The literal insanity of mainstream public discourse, and the lack of insight of this fact, suggests that Man without religion is non-viable.

To put matters another way - religion is the most important thing in the human world.  

Of course, a few individuals, in the short term, can survive atheism mentally intact; but there is no evidence at all that this is a possibility for human societies over more than a few decades - then the signs of insanity (incoherence, exitinction) become more-and-more obvious... or they would do so if loss of insight was not itself a prime sign of insanity.

So insanity shields us from knowledge of our own insanity, because insanity destroys insight as much as it destroys judgement - it affects the whole mode of thinking.

How, then, do we know we, as a society, are insane?

1. By applying older judgements, from the time before Men became insane - reading old books, talking to non-modern people...

2. By looking at the basic biological viability of atheist societies in terms of reproduction, demographics, response to direct and immediate threats, scale of priorities ... Compare societies and groups that are biologically viable, with the modern atheist societies that are not...

3. By reflecting on how we feel about Life. Insane people are almost always miserable - dysphoric, despairing, desperate... almost all of the time. Even the euphoric frenzy of mania is brittle, and crashes into suicidal self-destruction with a high frequency. Is there hope?

In conclusion - religion is the most important thing.

Religion is necessary for long term motivation, for social coherence, for purpose, and to enable the individual to be a part of the whole.

Since religion is necessary, if or when humans either dispense with religion or else place it anything lower than first in priority; then they as individuals and their societies will begin to fall apart and spiral towards alienation, purposelessness, inability to perceive or reason what is important, cowardice (i.e. short-term selfishness), desperation and all the rest of it.

Modernity is the experiment of Man living without Religion. The experiment has been running for several generations.

But the experiment of modernity has deprived modern people of the motivation, honesty and ability to evaluate the results of the experiment - by the always changing criteria of modernity, modernity sees no alternative to itself...

Conclusion: Religion is objectively necessary; and, by one kind of reasoning, therefore true. If you are not religious you are living in error. If you are not religious then you need to become religious. The question you must settle is not whether you should be religious, but which religion you will adopt.

As usual and expected, I think you demonstrate aliasing error confirmation biases because of your infatuation with religion as a solution.

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USA and Europe both are gluttons on socialism. The USA is following Europe’s lead. When the USA economy collapses, then you will see how few Americans really have the independent anti-socialism culture of our ancestors. I suspect it is rather small minority.

It is easier for people to claim they are conservative when they are well fattened and have jobs. But when their skills are no longer needed, then we will see their true character when they beg the government to do something. And then fight and steal when hopelessness sets in.

Look at the churches. They are mostly all corrupt. Most all took non-profit status with the IRS and there is a huge corruption issue there.

White people are in a massive defect-defect arrangement stealing as much as they can from each other before the debt machine breaks down.

After that, all hell breaks loose and we will see the true character of people.


And it is not religion or any other such "solution" which operates by delusion and mind programming.

Decentralization technologies are what I am pursuing. I had my time to experiment with the religion delusion. Been there, done that.

@r0ach, fungible money is the problem. Collaboration via forced consensus is the solutionSolving the defect-defect problem is the paramount issue. Gold and silver have nothing to offer.
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@And China’s demographic problem is not as catastrophic as it is feared to be, because they and Japan have billions of people in their economic region which they will migrate to, cultivate, and invest in. It is the common cultural values that most all Asians actually believe in hard work, family, death penalty for drugs, etc... all those core values of a productive, coherent civilization we lost in the decadent West.

Maybe after seeing this you should consider that they're making up bullshit about other subjects as well.

Gonna place this prediction here for sake of posterity to look back in a few years:

r0ach I dislike your profile picture having an innate dislike of cockroaches in general. I dislike your signature finding it disrespectful to a people and faith I hold in high esteem and I am unclear why you are so active in a bitcoin forum given your feelings on bitcoin.

That said I am going to try and help you by highlighting where I feel you are grossly mistaken. I believe your current paradigm if unadjusted will lead you to loss of economic opportunity. Like many detractors of bitcoin you focus on the speculative delivery vehicle (get rich quick mentality) and the ease of launching alt-coins. Both of these may be currently important in terms of price and adoption but are ultimately irrelevant in regards to long term value.

The long term value of bitcoin is the consensus network that remains after the mining rewards decline into insignificance. The quotes below highlight this logic. I recommend reading them including the linked Scientific American article on group selection.

I agree it is system that rewards cooperation, but the eventual (not immediate) failure mode similar to politics with a winner-take-all aggregation of economies-of-scale in mining and fungible finance (and remember the whales of fungible finance are economically also the whales of mining, cf. my public explanation to @Dorky). And when you see how my consensus algorithm works, you will see how everyone incentivized to cooperate without that flaw (unless I have a flaw in my reasoning about my design).

I wish you would have quoted this from me in your thread (so it is public some where for the record when Bitnet finally gets launched):

You mean guys like MPex and Roger Ver and the Winklevoss twins ?  No, they are in the game to get insanely rich on the back of the whole crowd of greater fool adopters.  Of course, given their whale status, they will do everything they can to promote bitcoin adoption (not merchant adoption, but speculative adoption), until they cash out of course.

The idealists of the first hour have been pushed out of the eco system by the design flaws of bitcoin that was made to "get rich quickly" rather than to become a neutral freedom currency (by capping, not the value, but the number of coins), and that separated users from industrial block chain providers (miners) with the PoW consensus mechanism.  Once you have an industrial "provider/customer" system (provider of industrial block chain vs user of transactions), in a highly speculative get-rich-quickly scheme, the system is such that there's too much money to be made to leave room for idealists, and you get a crabs bucket of sleazy players.  That's what bitcoin became, and it is baked into its initial design.

You have early adopters, indeed, getting rich quickly on the back of greater fools: these may behave as if they are "true believers" but are of course motivated by the growth of their wealth ; you have greater fools, hoping to be in still early enough in the game to imitate the early adopters, and become "somewhat rich quickly" too ; they are the main pumpers of the speculative market price.  All of these only want one thing: "More fresh flesh", but they call it "adoption", so that there's still enough influx of greater fools.  There's not much "idealism" behind that.  Hell, they are screaming for regulation and legal adoption, the opposite of what bitcoin was supposed to be, to be able to attract the funds of family fathers as greater fools to pump up the price and hence their wealth, and to keep out enough "freedom" by law so that these family fathers are not scared away from any anarchist thoughts.

Then you have the business around bitcoin: exchanges and industrial miners, that live off the "value leaks" in the system: they are the industrials living off the speculative hopes of family fathers making early adopters rich in the process: the more the gamblers play on the system they provide, the more they can leak off value from the players.  There's not much idealism in that either.


Yup, and because of fundamental design errors, it became a shark's greater-fool game with an industry that lives off the players.


These "whales" will cash out at a certain point, dumping on all the greater fools "and thanks for all the fish", to go to more lucrative horizons when bitcoin's greater-fool adoption potential reaches a ceiling ; or use their coins to win political power by bribing deciders in anonymous ways.


It is *obviously* a zero sum game ; well, it is a negative-sum game, because there's a net value flowing out to miners and exchanges.  There is (almost) no value created by the system (the only value that is created is the business opportunities on dark markets and other means of payment that cannot be easily done in fiat, but that's on the few percent level of the market cap at best), so obviously, all value that flows out of bitcoin, has to be put in there by other users.  


Nope.  Bitcoin's market cap is ENTIRELY DOMINATED by speculation.   Its "usage" as a currency is a negligible part of its market cap.   If tomorrow, all merchants decide to stop accepting bitcoin, that wouldn't influence the market cap in the slightest bit, because bitcoin's value is essentially determined by gamblers on exchanges, not by the demand for coins because you want to buy something.

And it is no surprise, because it was designed that way, and advertised that way: "there will only be 21 million coins, so buy your coins now, and be rich in 15 years".  That's the perfect invitation for a greater-fool game, and it is working as hell.  Once big financial players will find their way, it will go even much much higher ; and in the end, the last layer of greater fools will have paid for everything.

Bitcoin is an overarching consensus system organized around the concept of sound money. Those voluntarily participating in this consensus are required to behave transparently and do work with the ultimate aim of ensuring all network participants abide by the greater consensus. Nodes who choose not to follow the protocol, miners who submit invalid proof of work, and users who try to spend bitcoins without verified private keys, are simply ignored and excluded by the greater consensus.

Bitcoin is a form of group selection and group selection entails that group behavior be referenced to something outside the group. This something outside is the concept groups cohere and organize around. It is what they cooperate to promote. In the case of bitcoin the referenced object is the conceptual idea of a sound and ideal money.

People who believe bitcoin has no long term future are unlikely to participate in the system in any sustained manner. If you believe bitcoin is just a scam you may participate in the periphery trying to make money but logic will dictate you constantly keep one foot in the doorway. You will hesitate at being involved in anything but the most superficial manner. 

Probably you will choose not to invest at all but if you do then you are likely to cash out of the system at some point choosing to take your profits and leave the "tulip bubble" you have no confidence in. In this manner those who do not appreciate the underlying consensus mechanism will be diluted and replaced over time by those more interested in long term cooperation and building value.

It helps to understand what group selection is. Here is a basic introduction:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-good-for-the-group/

1) How large is the community of "true believers"?

This is unknown but I suspect the "true believers" control a huge percentage of the bitcoins and this is a good thing.

Bitcoin came on the scene as the obscure technical pet project of idealists, anarchist, open source advocates and libertarians who wanted to improve the world and reform the status quo.

These "true believers" will over time take on an altruistic role to stabilize and maintain the system. If you read my link on group selection above they are the functional equivalent of the fluorescens that maintain the polymer.

2) What influence will these true believers have on the ecosystem?

They will have an ever growing influence because true believers form a large percentage now and they stick around while those who erroneously think this is a zero-sum game are unlikely to enter or will come and go.

Yes there is competition and speculation. These fuel interests and motivate people to enter and explore the ecosystem but they are ultimately secondary. Competition of this kind fuels growth but as bitcoin block rewards dwindle to zero and knowledge of bitcoin becomes increasingly common these speculative opportunities fade unmasking the ever growing network of cooperative win-win interactions that represent the long term value of bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a self reinforcing consensus mechanism that ultimately screens for cooperation. There is a necessity for a degree altruism that is built in. This is most easily seen when looking at nodes. There is no financial incentive for any individual to run a node yet there are thousands of them despite that fact that pure economic self-interest would dictate free riding on someone else's node. The bitcoin consensus system is cleverly piggybacked on a delivery vector of speculation leveraging human greed to attract broad interest while selectively retaining those most interested in long term cooperation.

It is *obviously* a zero sum game ; well, it is a negative-sum game, because there's a net value flowing out to miners and exchanges.  There is (almost) no value created by the system (the only value that is created is the business opportunities on dark markets and other means of payment that cannot be easily done in fiat, but that's on the few percent level of the market cap at best), so obviously, all value that flows out of bitcoin, has to be put in there by other users. 

What you say doesn't contradict what I'm saying.  You may claim that there is a hard core of "true believers" which ARE indeed a community.  Most probably, yes, there is probably a hard core community of true believers.  However, the questions are:
1) how much of the ecosystem do they make up at any given moment in time
2) what influence can they have on the ecosystem ?

The way bitcoin is designed to be, turns around antagonism: we all want to possess coins, and if you possess a coin, I don't and vice versa, which makes us de facto antagonists ; there is competition in proof of work mining and the gains that go with it ; and deep down, it turns around speculation (which is a zero sum game).   There's nothing in bitcoin that is designed to be cooperative, apart from having to stick to the consensus protocol for reasons of greater loss if you don't.

You need to judge a system in comparison to the system it replaced not by the moral standards of a thousand years later. Chivalry emphasized bravery, military skill, generosity in victory, piety, and courtesy to women.

It was a tremendous improvement over the ethics of prior eras and a powerful testament to the civilizing power of ethical monotheism and Christianity.

This is the prior "ideal" it replaced. The veneration of the conquering alpha warrior.

We could both be interested in bitcoin as a tool to take wealth from one another... For instance, I may want bitcoin to fail...

Bitcoin is just a piece on the chess board, in the game of taking away wealth of your peers into your pocket ; the only "common interest" we have in such a system, is to rip off one another.  This is exactly because bitcoin (like most crypto) is a speculative asset, which is exactly that: a tool to rip off peers in essentially a zero-sum game. Whether that tool thrives or breaks when doing so, is of lesser importance.
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Nice picture, so romantic... the knight in armor is the protector, the savior, the hero. The woman look up to this Godly warrior as her savior - you can see the gratefulness on her face, her God saved her (by killing a few, or few hundred or even a few thousand human beings, not much different than the woman herself). No wonder God is a "he" a male figure. Poor females, they will have to bow the knee to their manly Gods. GOD be with them the day their heros aren't in such a good mood and want to take it out on his loyal subject(s).

Another attempt at rewriting the history of the Internet.

Those two statements don't really connect logically. Segwit is definitely not conservative - it's a re-org of the entire block structure, support software, and the underlying bitcoin protocol. It's a major deviation from Satoshi's vision.

Also, I see forcing people to second-tier/off-chain solutions as radical. Second-tier and Lightning are an unproven concepts and they're unnecessary at this time.

The conservative approach would've been a 2MB hard fork two years ago, before we got into this high-fees and unconfirmed transaction mess.

Interesting. It's surprising to see Core taking such a hard-line stance, as Bitcoin's market share erodes more daily.  Obviously Shillbert is working fist in glove with Blockstream/Core, so perhaps the goal of this whole "debate" and "agreement" is to shift the center of the debate toward Core more. It's just politics, which won't change the technical and economic realities for anyone who is thinking objectively.

Since UASF is essentially suicide, I don't think Core really has any negotiating leverage. They're just not in the position they think they are in...

Religions never helped us understand the truth.  Religions always provide the 'truths'.  And science has to work overtime to undo them.

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Now, religions are slowing down our progress.  Science and secular legal and moral frameworks essentially replace religion.  Religion is seen as a relic of the past.

Today, there are many other reasons why strangers might want to co-operate peacefully.  Religion is not one of them.
Religions are what divides us as humans.  Next step in human evolution, which will bring AI, cyborgs, colonization of other planets etc, will be done despite religions.

Religions hold us back.  The benefits it once had, are already achieved by other means.