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Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

The United States itself is also a kind of religion.

We have our gods (founding fathers, dead presidents) and demigods (American folk heros, war heros).

We have our sacred texts (Constitution, Declaration, etc) and our genesis story (War for Independence).

We have our temples (capitals, court houses).

We have our core beliefs (representative democracy is good, all men are created equal, the peaceful transition of power).

Citizens of this country worship at the alter of Americanism, and many of us work hard to make the religion successful and dominant throughout the world. Like other religions, we've even engaged in genocides and wars to spread our beliefs and convert or destroy the unbelievers.

The United States succeeds only because a critical mass of us choose to believe in this religion and really want it to succeed.

Is it really that much different from Bitcoin?

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'The United States succeeds only because a critical mass of us choose to believe in this religion and really want it to succeed.'

Systems ought not require faith in order to be successful. An actor can believe in the good of a system without worshipping it; the kind of 'religion of America' you describe is the framework culpable for many of the worst atrocities the US has committed: Iraq, Vietnam, even Jim Crow or slavery can by tied to a reverence for some fundamental eidolon of 'Americanism'. Separating church and state is meaningless if you turn the state into a church: our systems should be meaningful without the crutch of the founding fathers, the constitution (as a historical object), or the piety of our public infrastructure.

There may be an element of the United States social project which resembles religion, an element that is likely very similar to crypto worship. However, this is not a defense of crypto's legitimacy, but a scathing critique of America's ontological basis.

Bitcoin "the system" doesn't require faith to work. It works by pure cryptographic rigor that is provably infeasible to cheat, along with an adaptive ruleset that responds to changes in external conditions to keep running as designed. It just works, and I don't need any faith to know that. I just need a solid understanding of math and computer science.

Bitcoin "the price" is fundamentally different from the system, and really just serves to operate as a signal for how much collective human attention and trust it is gathering. It's incredibly volatile because it's still so young and finding it's place.

I also don't think the religious element of bitcoin is likely to be a long term thing, but a kind of bootstrapping mechanism to both draw attention, and nurture a core foundation of devotees who are committed to working diligently to integrate "the system" more and more into the real world.

The price and the system are really inseparable from each other. If bitcoin was worth $0, there would be no computers running it and so it wouldn't exist as a system. So the system does require faith to work.

Fair enough.

It requires a bare minimum of 2 people to really work.

But that's literally true of any network protocol you can possibly imagine.

> We have our gods (founding fathers, dead presidents) and demigods (American folk heros, war heros).

Relevant: had they not removed it, this sculpture of George Washington would have greeted visitors to the US Capitol rotunda, handing them the hilt of a sword and pointing directly upward: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_(Greenough)

…to draw their eye to the mural on the rotunda dome where a deified Washington takes the sword back from them in death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apotheosis_of_Washington#/...

> We have our gods (founding fathers, dead presidents) and demigods (American folk heros, war heros).

> We have our sacred texts (Constitution, Declaration, etc) and our genesis story (War for Independence).

> We have our temples (capitals, court houses).

> We have our core beliefs (representative democracy is good, all men are created equal).

I'd be willing to bet a month's worth of my income that a majority of the population doesn't view it this way. The only people I know who view things this way are very far to the right (and this group is not the majority on the far right by any means).

The only part I'd be willing to bet is shared by more than 50% of the population is that all men are created equal (in theory at least; there are plenty of people with disabilities who would disagree that they are viewed as equals in practice; you needn't think too far beyond who would be sacrificed on a deserted island first and without much conflict).

I don't think I agree.

The different political alignments are really just different sects of the nationalism/religion. Liberals simply idealize a different subset of the core tenants, and maybe are more tempered in their zealotry. But they are nationalist to their core nonetheless.

Having said that, there certainly are other groups that don't prescribe to Americanism, and are loyal to other 'religions' be it globalism or some other political ideology that's incompatible with American ideals.

I would even argue that Bitcoin is itself a flavor of globalism, albeit one that the establishment global elite aren't cool with, because they missed the boat on being early adopters and their power would be radically diminished if it wins.

If you artificially constrain yourself to an overton window that excludes e.g Bernie Sanders, sure. That's a false equivalence that's being pushed by one ideological cluster though, similar to the horse shoe theory or the idea that the center is reasonable. There are a lot of people who have problems with the idea of nations themselves. And there are people for whom politics is not part of their identity, but simply a part of negotiationing existence with the world. Again, specific clusters of the political landscape use and fulfill the patterns of religions much more than others (demonizing the other, dehumanising the other, creating a mythology of the ingroup that doesn't tie to material reality) and it's in their interest to push the idea that everyone does that, that the other side is equally religious in their politics and therefore it's not a case of one group wanting special treatment in a system that's meant to be equitable, it's everyone gunning for special treatment with some winners, some losers, politics as war between equally valid but inherently unchangeable ideologies that justifies the actions one takes.

I personally disagree with that politics as war perspective, as well as with the false equivalence

Yes, because bitcoin doesn't haven’t any of those things you mentioned, except for people who want more money.

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