Why do people say Bitcoin is a religion?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikIBxpgrI_U
All money is an effect of humans suffering reification / psychosis over their aversion to noxious stimuli, and trying to ‘store’ a representation of solutions to those aversion states in this or that physical form.
Basically – a process carried out by sufficiently integrated information processors (usually a biological connectome, might be possible in other structures too) is trying to create a “misplaced concreteness” about an abstraction on a subset of the process itself. It’s like a conscious MC Escher painting of a mapping function obsessed with its ability to make maps, and mistaking those maps for the territory – tragic in many ways and in some a little funny, perhaps.
This does not mean the process (mining, hash rate, difficulty adjustment, halvings) is itself a religion. As long as it has energy, it’s going to keep doing what it does.
However, there are many people (like Max in the video) who do deify and reify the process that is bitcoin, and worship their reification religiously. This does not mean everything they have to say about its probable utility is false. Just that their arguments are frequently invalid or unsound, and they will make many wildly inaccurate predictions.
Cryptocurrency
