https://ift.tt/3fsJQfX is mass formation psychosis.

The reason people support Bitcoin is because they have placed their trust in a large group of computer scientists and engineers – who are experts in the field – over a bunch of script kiddies, financiers and pseudo-scientists spinning up various alts and sewing all kinds of nonsense about the technology. In effect, people have placed their trust in the consensus of experts.

For the same reason you will hire and place your trust in a qualified plumber to fix a leaky sink, not a computer engineer.

Mass formation psychosis isn’t even a real term. It was made up by one guy on a popular podcast that a small group of people (suffering a sort of group psychosis themselves) then began spreading around social media (in an attempt to make themselves look clever, I guess).

The same happens with altcoin scams all the time, especially when someone on the team happens to have some vague computer science related qualification; Brandolini’s Law then kicks in with these scams (“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it.”) and the folks who are *real* experts in all this are heavily outnumbered by those peddling misinformation.

And yet, Bitcoiners all continue to place our trust in the consensus of “well informed crowds” i.e. the greatest number of *real* computer science experts in this community that were there from the beginning. Here’s a [group of real bona fide group psychology experts](https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-coronavirus-psychology-idUSL1N2TN1RE) that were asked to comment on ‘mass formation psychosis’. Their conclusion? A made up term.

*”the term doesn’t exist as a real academic concept. I’ve been studying group identity and collective behaviour for nearly two decades and not once have I come across this term. It seems to have been made up recently. There are similar-sounding concepts, like ‘mass psychogenic illness,’ (*[here](https://www.aafp.org/afp/2000/1215/p2655.html)*) but the scope of these is relatively narrow compared to what is being proposed here.” — Jay Van Bavel, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York*

Bitcoin has value because a large group of people **believe** it has value. They are a group who grew up comfortable working in the digital world and have placed their trust in a new technology that bona fide computer science experts came up with in the original whitepaper and is now maintained by 1000s of highly qualified computer engineers and scientists from MIT to UCL. In that sense, Bitcoin is the original mRNA Vaccine of the cryptocurrency world.

Fiat has value because a large group of people who grew up in the pre-digital world **believe** it has value. They have placed their trust in an older form of science that has proven able to keep society stable for many centuries. Fiat is the Vector Vaccine of the currency world.

Since those worlds need to co-exist and both technologies can facilitate trade, fiat *and* bitcoin will continue to hold value.