THE JOKE
The site futurism.com, in an attempt to advertise their upcoming cryptocurrency news website named Blocknik, posted a fake item on this supposed First Church of Crypto. There were posters plastered in the a Brooklyn neighborhood to stir up interest in Blocknik to get people riled up. It worked. There was a Facebook Event page created to protest this new church with this caption:
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A group that worships “bitcoin” is trying to buy a church in North Williamsburg. We must STOP the Bitcoin CULT. We will meet at McCarren Park after morning services. Join us Saturday at The Bean at 3PM for sign making and some sweet treats.Apparently, 12 people agreed to go to this "event". It will be interesting to see what happens. Even Reddit got in on the event. Twitter of course, was also involved. After admitting their involvement Futurism made a very good point: "The fervor around crypto, perpetrated by its loudest, most absurd, unilateral boosters is comically, blindingly obtuse to its own dumbassery." This is completely true. It is also completely true about sports, money, cars, politics, religion and anything else that man can get passionate about. Really it is not a novel observation, at least not now. It was uttered in a far more eloquent manner by the Son of God more than 2,000 years ago.It is all about who one serves:
"No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." (Matthew 6:24)It is also about where a persons heart is:
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (Matthew 6:19)This is not an attack on blockchain technology nor on cryptocurrencies. They look to change the way the world will transact many exchanges, whether they be of money or information. Like all useful things in life they have their proper place. But when they become an obsessive focus to the point of some sort of religious fervor then it becomes an idol of sorts. Idols don't require statues nor kneeling worshippers. They simply require complete devotion.
THE REALITY
Like pagans making the pilgrimage to the Holy Land during the crusades, so are the masses walking the treacherous landscapes of Cryptoland. Fearfully navigating hot, warm and cold wallets, centralized exchanges, creating rituals to safeguard their vulnerable private keys, and fearing the wrath of “god almighty’s” threat of legislating this great technology into oblivion while sacrificing all for the hope of redemption.
People often tell me I am religious about cryptocurrency and to that I say, maybe they are right. When I look at how a religion acts, they follow worships and practices and beliefs blindly. Well HODL BTFD are these not our practices?
I believe so, I believe we have all been indoctrinated into a new religion, one where the leader is the creator of the revolution of freedom of currency. Mankind was never meant to serve the central banks, cryptocurrency and satoshi has led us to the freedom we seek!
Is this not religion? What is religion? I believe those who see cryptocurrency as near or completely religious are closer to the truth than those who deny its power and call it a fraud or a joke! We do not ever joke about these things! HODL AND BTFD! These are religious practices, not just statements thrown around for jokes and fund! Satoshi led us to the light, we thank him forever and we embrace the teachings left for us to learn freedom of currency in this world!
One of the most prominent and well known supporters of cryptocurrencies is James Altucher. In an article of September 21, 2017, his views are described:
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Altucher sees cryptocurrency (or "data currencies" as he'd prefer to call them) as the next step forward in the long progression of the global financial system. Each step forward solved problems that the previous system didn't fix.
For instance, gold solved many of the barter system's problems by allowing people to price everything using the precious metal as a common currency. But, it's neither safe nor practical to travel with sacks of gold bars, so paper currency replaced gold.
And then paper currency became "more electric," Altucher said.
Banks can track how much money we have by using accounts tied to debit and credit card
numbers, and by virtualizing money this way, business is even easier to transact than it was using paper currency.
This transition, according to Altucher, has profoundly philosophical roots, and won't end until all transactions and currencies become totally data driven.
Referencing the work of writer Yuval Noah Harari, Altucher believes we're in the process of moving from theism, via humanism, to "data-ism."
That might be a lot of mystical "isms" for an investor to swallow, but Altucher makes the philosophy a lot more practical with a metaphor: If you got sick in the old days, you prayed to god to fix your health problems; then you went to a doctor to fix your illness; and now you go to data to fix your health.
Yuval Harari
"You get an MRI. You get an EEG. The data figures out what your illness is," he said, continuing: "If you look at every industry it all boils down to that same trend." And, according to Altucher, that trend is very much alive with currency today, where we're moving from "In God We Trust" to the more data-driven "In Cryptography We Trust."
"There's an emerging market called Dataism, which venerates neither gods nor man - it worships data. From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips." Yuval Harari
These ideas do not originate with Altucher but come from Yuval Harari. He consolidated those ideas in a book titled, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The history of humanity is classified into 4 different epochs, The Cognitive Revolution, Agricultural Revolution, The Unification of mankind and The Scientific Revolution. Harari states:Sapiens used their advantage in data processing to overrun the entire world. However, as they spread into different lands and climates they lost touch with one another, and underwent diverse cultural transformations. The result was an immense variety of human cultures, each with its own lifestyle, behaviour patterns and world view.
If humankind is indeed a single data-processing system, what is its output? Dataists would say that its output will be the creation of a new and even more efficient data-processing system, called the Internet-of-All-Things. Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish.Of course, Altucher and other believers in blockchains do not necessarily hold to Harari's views in this area. But they do hold to his views on the value and complete trust in data.
THE IMPERFECTIONS OF THE BLOCKCHAIN
"Code was supposed to eliminate the need to trust humans. But humans, it turns out, are tough to take out of the equation." Klint Finley
Speaking of this hack that happened with Ethereum, a Wired magazine article explained HOW it happened:
The DAO is a piece of software known as a "smart contract"–essentially an agreement that enforces itself via code rather than courts. But like all software, smart contracts do exactly what their makers program them to do—and sometimes those programs have unintended consequences.
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It's not clear yet exactly how the hack worked, says Andrew Miller, a PhD student at the University of Maryland who studies smart contracts and helped audit Ethereum's code last year. But he says the attacker probably exploited a programming mistake that's exceedingly common in smart contracts.
Let's say you have $50 in the bank and you want to withdraw that from an ATM. You insert your card, punch in your PIN number and then request that $50. Before the machine spits out the cash it will check your balance. Once it spits out the cash, it will debit $50 from that balance. Then the machine asks you if you'd like to process another transaction. You tap "yes" and try to take $50 again. But the ATM sees that your balance is now $0 and refuses. It asks you again if you want to process another transaction, so this time you say "no." Your session ends.
Now imagine that the ATM didn't record your new balance until you ended the session. You could keep requesting $50 again and again until you finally told the machine you didn't want to process any more transactions—or the machine ran out of money.
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The DAO hacker was probably able to run a transaction that automatically repeated itself over and over again before the system checked the balance, Miller says. That would allow anyone to pull far more money out of the fund than they put in.
Blockchains will be very useful and will most likely will be the world standard for transactions in the near future. But, to believe that they will make dramatic social reforms and bring the world to an age of righteous and honest living is extremely unlikely.The programming language that Ethereum developers use to write smart contracts, Solidity, makes it really easy to make this sort of mistake, says Emin Gun Sirer, a Cornell University computer scientist who co-authored a paper earlier this year pointing out a number of potential pitfalls in the DAO's design. Others have previously spotted places in the DAO code that would have made such a theft possible. Sirer says the DAO developers have tried to be vigilant about preventing such flaws, but because it's such an easy mistake to make, it's not surprising that instances of the bug escaped notice.
Blockchains are going to rule the world, providing a mechanism for scaling social and economic cooperation to an unprecedented level — a truly global scale. Such cooperation will involve not only human beings, groups and associations but also a growing multitude of increasingly independent artificial agents. Not all blockchains are created equal. There are three key characteristics that make scalable blockchain-enabled cooperation possible: openness, neutrality and immutability.
The blockchain is a truth machine preserving one universally accepted version of history, one immutable sequence of events. What’s true once is always true, regardless of political or business interests, and no amount of lobbying can change that. If it’s simply not possible to change history, then no resources are wasted on the effort. If there are any loopholes at all, then sufficiently motivated and determined interest groups will exploit them at the expense of others, diminishing network value for everyone.
The rules governing the blockchain network are known in advance. They’re exactly the same for everyone and not subject to change other than with 100% consensus. Yes, it must be 100%. Because any change to the system’s rules that not all participants freely agree to creates a network split, diminishing network value for everyone.
Here is where the major point made by those who support Ethereum Classic is very logical:
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If any aspect of the blockchain system becomes subject to centralized control, this introduces an attack vector enabling the violation of one or more of the key blockchain characteristics. It may be possible to limit participation (such as by enforcing AML/KYC rules), thus violating openness. It may be possible to enforce discriminatory policies (such as by filtering “illegal” transactions), thus violating neutrality. It may be possible to rewrite the history of events (such as by confiscating or “redistributing” funds), thus violating immutability. Introducing centralized chokepoints creates a precondition for the introduction of “blockchain intermediaries or controllers” who can siphon value out of the system at other participants’ expense.
So decentralization is the most important feature of blockchain systems, the one everything else depends on. With decentralization, blockchains will come to rule the world. Without it, they’ll be “contained” and railroaded into niche applications.So it can be seen that blockchains, although still in their infancy, although still in development and tweaking, still face important issues which will decide whether they can be altered by those in power, whether they be bankers or the programmers who invented them.
Also programmers could insert information in the ledger unrelated to the transaction, as pointed out by an intriguing pamphlet titled, Why Distributed Ledger Technology Must Adapt To An Imperfect World, produced by Accenture, a consulting firm. It states:
In 2013 it was discovered that illegal pornography had been embedded as metadata on Bitcoin’s immutable blockchain. Three years later it is still there for all to see. As is a pixelated likeness of former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke,⁴ courtesy of another blockchain prankster. Even more distressing for the national security community, over 250,000 classified diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in 2010 were immortalized on blockchain in a 2.5 megabyte file embedded across 130 separate bitcoin transactions. This kind of mischief, some harmless and some potentially criminal, could be solved through a range of options. But for enterprise systems—often heavily regulated—and for used in permissioned environments with designated administrators it points to larger practical problems with the immutable blockchain, particularly in the traditional capital markets industry.
Also consider the innocent but not uncommon “wrong counterparty / wrong book” problem — trades that are mistakenly booked to the wrong trading account or apply the wrong symbols, marks or maturity. In the same way that banks need to ensure confidentiality between counterparties on correctly booked trades they also need to protect confidentiality when errors occur. If those errors cannot be corrected on a blockchain system, it becomes possible for one market participant to decipher another’s trading strategy.Blockchains still have many essential issues to resolve. Yes use blockchains! Perfect them! But do not worship them (or pin your hopes for a better world in them which is the same)!
A BETTER ALTERNATIVE
"I the Lord do not change. So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed. Ever since the time of your ancestors you have turned away from my decrees and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord Almighty." Malachi 3:6
A better alternative has been at hand for at least 2,000 years. Reliance on a being that is truly immutable. The one who opened the Red Sea, the one who led the people of Israel to their promised land, the one who removed them from that land for disobedience and since the arrival of His son on this planet offers eternal peace which the world cannot understand. Man can try by his own efforts to perfect this world, but ultimately it is irredeemable. It belongs to the evil one who is its king. It is evil to take the intelligence that has been given by a gracious God and worship what that intelligence has created. THE ULTIMATE AND DIVINE BLOCKCHAIN
This is the ultimate blockchain using divine ledger technology. It cannot be hacked by men. It is complete and covers not only outward actions but internal motivations from the heart. It covers everything that happened in the universe to the ultimate detail.
And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. (Revelations 20:12)This God was proclaimed of old by a mighty King of Babylon. A man who conquered many nations, who saw many kings fall before him in homage. Towards the end of his life he came to see personally the power of the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings. He proclaimed:
How great are his signs,
how mighty his wonders!
His kingdom is an eternal kingdom;
his dominion endures from generation to generation.
(Daniel 4:3)
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