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Bitcoin is a form of digital religion (shower thought)
254 sats \ 2 comments \ @0xIlmari 13 Jul 2023 bitcoin
Just a shower thought, probably nothing, but someone may find it interesting.
You proclaim your faith by choosing a particular version of Bitcoin Core to run. Through that choice you tell the world what you believe Bitcoin to be.
Now, you could modify the code to do something else, for example increase the block subsidy back to 50 BTC and start granting that to yourself, or increase the block size. However, other "believers" would just be like "nah bro, I don't believe it that", ignore you and move on with their lives.
But no one would stop you from continuing to run that software and continue to believe it to be the "better" Bitcoin. You might even convince other people to do the same thing, forming a "sect".
Still, most people continue to believe in "mainstream Bitcoin".
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136 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 13 Jul 2023
Bitcoin is as much a religion as money is a religion.
Its a social construct. If you want to call believing people born to the same parents as being more special requiring special obligations that other people wouldn't have, or adopted siblings, or step siblings (the concept of family which gets very messy when you look into it) a religion, you can go be weird by yourself.
However, economists do generally recognize the importance of "the faith of the currency". When your currency loses the "faith" of the people, you run into "sticky inflation". Look up the story of the Brazilian "real" to understand that.
But yes, you declare your belief in how the social construct is or ought to be by running your version of Bitcoin on your computer. When you network (both in the computer terminology and in the social worker "networking" terminology) you share in a monetary system called Bitcoin
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @ae52f929c 13 Jul 2023
Bitcoin isn't a system built on believing in faith. Bitcoin is a system built on facts truth and rules. The only belief is the belief in what can be proven to be true. Those rules are designed and exist for a specific reason. Any attempt to change those rules is a failure to understand the knowledge of why those rules exist or is an attempt to commit fraud by way of deception either by changing of the rules or misrepresenting the facts. If you have a "belief" otherwise, it is because the knowledge is bad and needs to purged from memory. Faith requires a rejection of fact and the manufacturing of falsehoods, and there is no room in Bitcoin for rejection of fact otherwise the rules could change.
The reason it feels so unifying and religious like is because we all agree on the rules. We don't agree on the rules because we have faith that's the way they should be. We agree on the rules because we have all put in the effort to understand the knowledge of why the rules even exist in the first place. Knowledge unifies society.
It is the fact that we all nod in agreement that brings us together and creates the tribe, not the belief or faith in the rules themselves. I think that might be the essence you are trying to uncover.
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