It's really easy to compare Bitcoin to Christianity: it's got sins and a missing savior and an immaculate conception (okay, really it's probably more like the annunciation, but Madonna changed the words for all of us), and Bitcoiners are supposed to preach the good news...
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 22 Oct
It feels like the industrial revolution to me - sneaky, bottom-up, less about particular technologies and more about infecting everything by being salient.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @wackster OP 22 Oct
I've never researched this, but I wonder if people were very conscious of participating in something (an industrial revolution, a technological shift, a new era) or if it all felt so diffuse and so bottom-up that there wasn't really an awareness of an industrial revolution until long after. I'm sure books have been written on the topic, but I'm curious how the inventors and tinkerers and business-people of 17th and 18th centuries felt about their place in history: did they feel like they were ushering in a new era?
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126 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 22 Oct
The Protestant Reformation. Bitcoin White Paper Day (October 31, 2008), when Satoshi published the white paper, announcing his thesis for a better money, is the same as Reformation Day (October 31, 1517), when Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses to the Wittenberg cathedral
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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @wackster OP 22 Oct
the reformation day date has always struck me as interesting. let's hope bitcoin doesn't lead to quite so many wars.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 22 Oct
Unfortunately that is not necessarily up to the bitcoiners
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110 sats \ 2 replies \ @justin_shocknet 22 Oct
Plaza Accord.
In the 80s the US was facing a problem with the dollar being too strong, hurting international trade positions. Obviously letting the dollar collapse outright would have meant panic, capital flight, loss of strategic control since there was no real alternative except for maybe gold which had already been looted leading up to 1971.
Bitcoin has similarly been pressure valve in disguise to foster a transition to something more sustainable than foreign exchange, with buy-in made consensual through grassroots mythology and market incentives. In this way both controlled a monetary pivot necessitated by the US dollar being used against its own country in the form of the Triffin Dilemma and globalist leverage.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @wackster OP 22 Oct
I see the analogy, but I disagree with the implication: if our political overlords were effective enough to plan, engineer, and execute something like this, they wouldn't have the problems this solution solves.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 22 Oct
Politics is just theater, politicians are just actors, strings pulled from the IC. The greatest psyop ever was convincing people they're incompetent. "Appear weak when you are strong".
They have effectively unlimited resources, all the planning power, blackmail, sigint, you can conceive of and more. If they can write movie scripts about the CIA they can write operational plans of military grade.
The only hiccup is that its a battlefield, faction vs. faction, that's chaos not incompetence.
That's exactly why Bitcoin was a perfect solution, the enemy doesn't get much of a vote in stopping it, and in fact they have an incentive not to.
"Bitcoin is for enemies" is quite literal, America's enemies.
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133 sats \ 1 reply \ @Fenix 23 Oct
No analogy is good and accurate enough, especially those nonsensical ones with a religious bent. The event of Bitcoin's creation is what it is; by itself it is important and grand.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @beyond_turbulence 23h
No blueprint can quite capture it! The ornate, gilded ones drawn up in the old world's drafting rooms!?! Bitcoin’s foundation needs no spire or cornerstone blessing; it emerged like a new steel frame on the skyline—sober, monumental, and structurally sound.
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133 sats \ 6 replies \ @fourrules 22 Oct
The cross was the work
The highest hill was the proof
The criminals left and right of the carpenters son showed that anyone could mine, run a node, or hold, and we were all beckoned to follow Him
His solitude was His sovereignty
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0 sats \ 5 replies \ @beyond_turbulence 22 Oct
The cross is like the steel frame, the essential structure of an endeavor, perhaps. The summit is the rooftop terrace gardens like an observatory, confirming trajectory. The figures beside the Architect prove that any laborer could rivet the beams, manage the project, or read the blueprints—and all were hired to build. Solitude is the executive suite, authority over the skyline.
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @fourrules 18h
Ironically your attempt at cynicism still contains the 4 pillars of the monomyth, but you've mixed up different hierarchies into a brown blob of play dough, or a cryptid.
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33 sats \ 2 replies \ @fourrules 17h
The building is the dragon, the challenge
The rooftop terrace, the goal, the "Observatory", is the gold, the proof.
Reference to laborors describes the building process as inclusive, collective, not quite permissionless but no game is perfect, in other words the villagers.
The executive suite represents responsibility, authority, sovereignty, the loneliest condition, the solo knight.
But the most popular instances of the monomyth describe the transition from laboror (everyman) to executive (hero).
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @beyond_turbulence 11h
Manhattan is education. Are you familiar with it ? The building is the Sophia — vast, coiled in scaffolds, humming with tension waiting to strike an elk with a vehicle! A rattlesnake coiled and hissing ! It’s not like a phone vibrating.
Each floor doesn’t ascend past the I-40 for medical great wolves and yet another scale conquered is oblivious to the facts, ingredients and elements that correspond to a mathematics that does not deal with scales, another myth hammered into form.
The rooftop terrace — the “Observatory” — gleams like the the Barbello realm and its brackish water: gold not of currency, but life and clarity like procreation .
Oak Flats? Apache Stronghold!
The view from the Anasazi is proof — labor, when lifted high enough, turns to liquid and fluid light like the light of the world shining upon you.
Below, the laborers — villagers in hard hats — build the myth together unless they’re pimps with fake hard hats. Brick by brick, they chant the code of creation: inclusive, collective, imperfect. Not permissionless, perhaps, but still a shared ascent.
Above, the executive is not waiting in a high tower of solitude. He’s putting out fires with fire water in the cup.
Authority as altitude. Responsibility, leadership, power and grief is air that thins. The hero sits in the fluid, sovereign but silent, knowing that every summit is also a separation.
Yet the oldest story — the monomyth — is never about staying above. Megalithic architecture much? It’s grounding. It’s like the long spiral from villager to geopolymer, not sculpting and cutting like surgery theory or doing dead giant surgery! Too many hands in the pot, Apache tears! From joker to king or laboror to executive — and back again.
Because the true tower is rags to riches and riches to rags: those who rise must remember to build.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fourrules 9h
I'm not familiar with it!
Sorry I thought you were doing the cheap Sam Harris bit where he makes up a random invented meaning as though it's just the mind, that there is no meaning to be derived from biblical narrative.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fourrules 18h
That's reaching because the literal and precise parallels between Satoshi, the ultimate game designer, and Christ, the greatest player, make you uncomfortable. You're too emotionally invested in 'muh atheism', which is the intellectual level of a stunted teenager.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @LetMeSleep 9h
Crypto ?
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