Thread by @StewartalsopIII

Many people see similarities between faith in bitcoin and faith in religion.

Many simplistic moderns see the faith in bitcoin as silly. These people are silly and don't know the history of currency and its relationship to currency.

Religion and Money have always been tied.

Bitcoin is a new way of writing out "who paid who what?"

Most people don't know that the writing started first as trying to understand God. God is a placeholder for humans for everything bigger than us that we don't really understand but fills me with joy

https://twitter.com/mattytgray/status/1345512030250303489?s=20

The next use for writing that came long was:

Accounting!

Who paid who what? Who owes whom? Who needs to pay the government still?

But accounting and God, what do they have to do with each other?

The divine rights of kings! Leaders had to become tiny gods in order to rule.

And the government needed to get paid.

But then we came up with secularism and things got really confused. Fast forward to 2008 and then it got ever more confusing. God is dead and government is incompetent when it comes to sound money.

A movement is born! A bitcoin is born!

At its core, Bitcoin is an innovation in the accounting of credits and debits (who paid who what?).

When I send Bitcoin to your address, the exact amount of bitcoin that I send is debited from my address and credited to your address.

This is immutably secured (unchangeable) in history on the record of the blockchain. Miners compete with each other to solve cryptographic puzzles in order to record this on the blockchain. The winner gets paid in Bitcoin.

It is a system for accounting! Now the faith part.

It does seem like this is the first step in the transfer of godly power from governments to machines (something that will have externalities we can't see yet).

People don't have faith in Bitcoin, they have faith in the architecture of Bitcoin.

The architecture of Bitcoin is supposedly guaranteed to be human proof (but its not totally) and relies on computing power and competition among groups of humans (miners) to secure the system from attack by bad actors. So far it has survived every attack.

Yet it is theoretically possible to update the code of Bitcoin and create a hard fork. This has been tried with several versions, all of whom failed to get proper mind share from Bitcoin miners. This doesn't mean that it won't happen in the future, but it does mean its difficult.

Someone could theoretically convince more than 51% of miners to switch to their new network which messes with the original code to change the total amount of Bitcoin that is possible to mine, thus changing the supply and demand of Bitcoin. But here is where the faith comes in.

The values of the core group of people who created and made Bitcoin flourish would not let this happen (although who knows what will happen in the future now that institutional money is coming in).