Dogma kills brain cells
This article was published in Bitcoin Magazine. “The inscription problem”. click here To get an annual Bitcoin Magazine subscription.
Click here to download a PDF of this article.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most timid among them? Are you the JPEG people? Or is it Laser-Eyed Maxis? Or is it both?
The Bitcoin ecosystem has always had a dogmatic streak. It’s kind of an essential part of it. It takes a certain amount of stubbornness or dogmatism to get involved in something like Bitcoin this early and show the faith needed to stick with it. Bitcoin is almost 15 years old, and many new people who have just entered the field in the past few years don’t understand how drastically different the entire landscape was just five years ago.
It used to be that you could get 0.25 BTC by inserting a $50 bill into a Bitcoin ATM and entering your phone number, and there were no filters or restrictions on burner numbers without KYC attached. No country has adopted Bitcoin as fiat currency. The only ETF attempt was 100% guaranteed to be rejected without serious consideration or approval. Lightning was just a vague concept that had yet to be deployed in the real world. You had to be at least a little bit dogmatic to even briefly consider investing a significant amount of your net worth in Bitcoin. There were no real signs of success other than belief in the design. If I didn’t have that, I probably wouldn’t have stayed where I am. At least you’re in and out of the door often enough that you’ll be making a lot less money than you could have if you just stayed put.
Such a doctrine was necessary. Without it, the people who built today’s ecosystem wouldn’t have the motivation to do so. Without that doctrine, they wouldn’t have the customers and users to build something in the first place. It was the foundation of everything that surrounds us today.
Now the inevitable is happening. The foundation is collapsing.
Which church do you attend?
The problem with doctrine is that most of the time it starts to crack. The growth of discontent and opposition within existing doctrines does not disappear but increases. And its offshoots tend to reinforce existing doctrines within the people that remain external. When Europeans began to diverge ideologically from the Catholic Church, they did not destroy it. They split and created their own churches with their own conflicting doctrines. There was no death or decay as the Catholic Church faded into insignificance. Instead, the Protestant Reformation led to the spread of numerous ideologies that conflicted with its own doctrines that existed alongside the Catholic Church.
The Protestant Reformation of the 1500s is always depicted as the first major opposition movement to the Catholic Church, depicting life before Martin Luther as a peaceful environment of submission to the Church. However, this is not historical reality. The Great Schism that led to the division between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church occurred about 500 years before Martin Luther’s famous theses.
What was the first domino to fall in the divisive chain reaction? Churches in southern Italy that had celebrated Mass in Greek were told by the Pope that they had to celebrate Mass in Latin. Here the discrepancy multiplies. Is it permissible to use unleavened bread in Holy Communion? In the West, we thought so. The East disagreed. Should clergy remain celibate? The West thought it should be done that way, but the East disagreed.
This ultimately culminated in the dispatch of a papal envoy to Constantinople, where the Ecumenical Patriarch, the highest cleric of the East, was expressing these disagreements directly to the Pope. At a conference held in Constantinople, disagreements boiled over to the point where the head of the legates excommunicated the patriarch, and the patriarch excommunicated the members of the legates. This fracture never healed and led to a permanent schism between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church.
This split is not unlike the split between small and large blockers that culminated in a split of sorts at the end of the block size war in 2017. Both Catholics and various Eastern believers worshiped God. They both agreed on the deity of Jesus Christ. Ultimately, there was no disagreement or rift about the core fundamental truth, as both the small and big disruptors wanted Bitcoin to succeed and grow to become the dominant economic force in the world. They simply did not agree on how to achieve it.
They had the same goals, but differences in their ideas about how to achieve them led to an irreconcilable schism that lasted six years (or more than a thousand years in the case of the Church). At least they inherited the prevailing doctrine. Yes? wrong. Today, the estimated population of Catholics is one billion, while the Eastern Orthodox Church has about 200 million people. In both cases, despite creating new doctrines that attracted significant numbers of devout believers, neither the Orthodox Church nor the great disruptors actually destroyed or subsumed the existing doctrines.
Newsflash for a 10-year-old: When you tell someone that everything they believe about the universe around them is wrong, they end up digging deeper into their existing beliefs.
Protestant aversion to indulgences
Now we see that Protestants were not the first to split from the Catholic Church. Let’s take a look at what really happened to elicit such a harsh reaction from Woody. I mean Martin Luther. Indulgences – The way to be forgiven for your sins is to think that you just have to pay money. A common expression advertising indulgences, often cited as one of the things that finally pushed Luther over the edge, was, “As soon as the coin rings in the box, the soul rises from purgatory to heaven.” This is why Catholic priests boldly promote the idea that if you donate money to the church, your sins will automatically be forgiven.
“Follow these simple, easy steps to find your guaranteed financial salvation.” Sound familiar? All it takes is a dollar to read this book, follow these simple steps and you will find salvation. Just getting your hands on 0.1 BTC will give you a seat at the table as a member of the economic elite of the new world order. Promises like this are completely delusional, and the similarities between that type of evangelization and the Catholic practice of indulgences are too stark to deny.
Within the framework of this analogy, I would like to say that the JPEG People represent Protestantism. They are a group of Bitcoin users who are fed up with the idea that “this simple trick” can guarantee personal financial success using Bitcoin. They’re tired of putting so much energy into feeding those attitudes and narratives, especially in this space. Honestly, I can’t blame them, and I agree with some of the things they criticize and are upset about.
Not only has it become the dominant attitude in the field that Bitcoin doesn’t really need to do anything to succeed, but many people with that attitude actively attack, FUD, and label any efforts or ideas to solve Bitcoin’s shortcomings. , disturbing. To failure. I have been talking about this dynamic and the problems it is exacerbating many times over the years. It’s not the least bit surprising to me to see new subcultures and dogmas emerging in this space, defining themselves through opposition to blind attitudes toward predetermined success.
Here’s a cold, hard reality check. As mentioned earlier, the Protestant Reformation did not destroy or eliminate the Catholic Church. Despite an estimated population of 800 to 1 billion people, roughly the same size as the Catholic population, Protestants have not alienated the Catholic Church. The Pope remains one of the most listened to and respected religious figures in the world. Catholicism is still practiced throughout the world.
And the most fun part? Shortly after Martin Luther’s death, the church banned the exchange of money for the forgiveness of sins. What does this teach us? Even though the main reason for Protestants leaving and forming their own doctrines was actually stated and banned by the church, they did not return. Why is that? And the other factor that I just mentioned above is that the Protestant population is almost a billion people. They are not all one congregation or doctrine. Protestantism continued to divide and split over the years, forming conflicting and contradictory doctrines. They did not remain or grow as a rival group to Catholicism.
Opposition begets opposition
Does it now make more sense why Catholicism was not actually usurped or subsumed by the new doctrine? Nothing actually grows to the size it can. Existing doctrines sat around the content and did not change. It actually developed around opposition strong enough to incite a significant amount of people to challenge it and leave. When some aspects of the current doctrine became so disliked and disagreeable that people became dissuaded from its correctness, the current doctrine was eventually changed to acknowledge it. From a cool, logical perspective, it is simply a matter of survival.
So what about new doctrines born before the period of adaptation and evolution? Even after acknowledging their continued differences of opinion, they did not revert to their original beliefs. But that opposition, that acceptance, the fact that the new dogma was actually to some extent defined by it, festered. This encouraged those who adopted the new doctrine to even oppose it, and the cycle repeated itself. This is why there is no single “Protestant” doctrine. There are Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Baptists, Quakers, and Methodists. The list goes on.
We saw the same thing with big blockers. First, the Bitcoin Cash people split from Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash has since been split into Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. Both had numerous splits from that point on. Why should we expect JPEG People to be any different? They too largely define themselves as being “against” laser eyes. They pat themselves on the back for spurring adoption and cheer themselves on by saying they are “doing what laser eyes can’t do.” They too seem to form a camaraderie centered around “having laser eyes.” Their entire doctrine is defined almost entirely as the antithesis of the doctrine of the laser eye.
That is why it is likely that this new doctrine as it exists today will not have a long-lasting cultural effect. In a vacuum, nothing can be defined in and of itself. All Christians ostensibly have a belief in Jesus Christ, but many denominations define that belief in contrast to the Catholic Church. What is it in terms of the basis of faith? What really defines a person in terms of goals, motivation or net output?
The JPEG People claim to be here to “make Bitcoin fun again”, to get people engaged and interested in using Bitcoin, and it’s undeniable that there are quite a few people in that community who actually live by it. . But in my experience, there are far more people who define themselves as simply existing to “possess a laser eye” through their actions. It produces nothing of value. It doesn’t really instill a vision in people.
Anything that is defined solely by its opposition to another movement, dogma, or culture – a movement, dogma, or culture – loses its identity the moment the thing it stands against is defeated. To really create lasting, transformative cultural change, you need a foundation of identity that can exist on its own.
So what are these JPEG people without laser eyes? If I take it, will there be one there?
This article was published in Bitcoin Magazine. “The inscription problem”. click here To get an annual Bitcoin Magazine subscription.
Click here to download a PDF of this article.
