Bitcoin: a social creature (mushroom)

In this article, a study of Hype Cycles, Ethnomycology, and the Satoshi cult.

Introduction

In the previous article"Bitcoin: a micellar decentralized organism (mycelium)»we looked at decentralized architectureBitcoin through the prism of mycelium. In our review, we covered a lot of topics, including the prototype of a decentralized network, antifragility, the Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm, arbitrage, the role of Bitcoin in its ecosystem, and the benefits of decentralization.

Be that as it may, our story with mushrooms is not yetcompleted. Reproduction is the next stage of the mushroom life cycle. Mushrooms reproduce with the help of the fruiting body, which in everyday life is usually called simply “mushroom”. Upon reaching maturity, the fungi release tiny seeds, spores that can populate new territories.

Despite the fact that the mushroom kingdom seems to usquite alien compared to life in the animal kingdom, mankind has long maintained a special relationship with mushrooms. Historically, mushrooms have been a secret, fear, opportunity, inconstancy, and for some - worship.

In this article (second part of the cycle), we are going to explore Bitcoin as a social phenomenon through the prism of a mysterious mushroom.

Here is a list of all the articles in this series for your information:

• Part 1. Bitcoin: a micellar decentralized organism (mycelium)
• Part 2. Bitcoin: a social being (mushroom) - this article
• Part 3: Bitcoin: antivirus against macro uncertainty (medicine)
• Part 4. Bitcoin: a catalyst for human evolution (space money) - coming soon!

* Translation of the remaining parts will appear on BitNews soon *

Well then, let's get started!

Bitcoin — it is a social system ratified by a code

The Bitcoin ecosystem is taken separatelyelements, people, each of which has its own point of view, motivation and ability. Collectively, they all form a consensus on the rules of the Bitcoin game. The code simply ratifies this social consensus.

From a fundamental article by Hasu, The Bitcoin Social Contract:

“The Bitcoin protocol automates the social contract, and society itself determines the rules of Bitcoin, based on the consensus of its users. They are symbiotic and cannot exist without each other. ”

Humans are sloppy, emotional, predictably irrational creatures. Bitcoin, made up of a community of people, is no different.

Section No. 1: Human Psychology, Hype Cycles and the “Mushroom Method”

Mushrooms are mainly in their"Mycelial form", which can be considered as an underground root system connecting trees and plants. People will not even know about the existence of mycelium, since most of his life he quietly and peacefully spends himself underground.

However, when the mycelium feels that the conditionsbecome favorable (temperature, humidity, etc.) it sends its fruiting bodies (mushrooms) to the surface of the earth. These fruiting bodies are the genital organs of the mycelium - essentially the phallic systems for the delivery of spores (seeds).

Before the mushrooms break through the soil, myceliumfocuses its energy in tiny lumps, a cluster of cells called "pin heads". "Pinheads" sit on the strings of the mycelium in anticipation of the perfect moment. Then, it would seem, out of nowhere, mushrooms (fruiting bodies) break out of the ground, doubling in size every day until they reach maturity.

Mushroom Fact # 1: Some types of mushrooms are strong enough to make their way to the surface even through asphalt.

After the mushroom is fully ripe, it literally “explodes in ecstasy” and releases millions of tiny spores (mushroom “seeds”), after which it quickly decomposes back into the ground.

The fruit body of the fungus lives only forseveral significant days, and besides, most spores die at the initial stage, however, nevertheless, a small percentage of the spores will spread nearby and form new mushroom colonies. These newly formed colonies can remain underground for several years before the reproductive cycle continues again.

The fact about mushrooms No. 2: Disputes weigh almost nothing, which allows themeasy to navigate. Theoretically, spores can catch an upward current and leave the Earth’s orbit. By a lucky (for them) chance, they are on a short list of those biological substances that can survive the cold of vacuum and the radiation of space. Does the word "panspermia" mean anything to anyone? Save your foil caps for the third part of this cycle.

 

Hype Bitcoin cycles resemble the process of reproduction of mushrooms

For the casual observer, most of lifeBitcoin is boring and monotonous - months go by, but nothing really happens. Then, when the conditions become suitable, Bitcoin seems to explode in life, tremendously increasing in size and capturing the consciousness of observers. Its price is skyrocketing, the media are awash with enthusiastic hyperbolas, and the chat rooms are inundated with messages from the "normals."

Further, almost immediately after hereaches its peak, Bitcoin fades, falling back into oblivion, as random participants attribute this to a general short-term hobby, hype or unsuccessful experiment. And like mushroom spores, most new users are leaving the Bitcoin ecosystem. However, a small percentage still remains and creates new colonies on the “Bitcoin land”. These bear market survivors are becoming new “holders of last resort."

It is not surprising that the ideological part of the bear market is determined by surface activity (price).

Bitcoin's detractors mistake the hype cycle as a «mushroom» for the overall picture «mycelium network»

Amnesic "experts" proudly join the crowd screaming that Bitcoin has died (for the 335th time). Fiat maximalists slice victorious circles by tweeting 12-month charts.

“You are confusing mycelium with a mushroom!” — Nick Carter

Roubini celebrates with a barbecue in honor of the 3rd Bear Market. Enemies come together to fry this notorious mushroom (Bitcoin), patting each other on the back.

Sayfiddin Amos: Small amendment: Roubini scoffed at Bitcoin not when it cost $ 600. He mocked him when he cost $ 58. Imagine how low the level of concentration of attention should be and how strong self-deception is to gloat with rapture at each jump down during growth from $ 58 to $ 7,000. Nuriel Roubini: In a warm company with gold. While everyone's attention was focused on gold and silver, Bitcoin fell another 40%, selling below $ 58.

However, in fairness, it should be said thatBitcoin is hard to understand. In the minds of many "crypto people", there is still an opinion that Bitcoin is myspace (social network), and Ripplecoin is a "standard". Not surprisingly, most journalists do not understand the meaning of what is happening. Imagine yourself in the place of a well-meaning ordinary journalist who was appointed to write exclusive material about Bitcoin.

While the mushroom has already died (the recent hype cycle), the mycelium (Bitcoin) thrives and grows underground.

Like a mushroom after flowering, joyful enthusiasmBitcoin is fading, and its price is rapidly falling. Such a bearish trend will throw weak players out of the market, hedge funds will crash, ICOs will return money to investors, or, even worse, these projects will fail, and some charlatans will be exposed.

However, the “scammers”, new and old, massively go underground and improve Bitcoin without fuss: they build, study and form alliances.

Bitcoin improved significantly in 2018:

• Lightning Network is gaining momentum;
• The share of transactions in the BTC network using the SegWit protocol approached 60%;
• Jimmy Song and Justin Moon are preparing new Bitcoin developers;
• The Block sets the standard for journalism in the industry;
• Casa, Pierre, Nodl, and others make it easy to run full nodes;
• Nomics provides more reliable data compared to CoinMarketCap (SMS is the main resource for tracking cryptocurrency rates);
• The foundations are laid for inevitable financialization (Fidelity, Bakkt, etc.);
• Schnorr Signatures Generated (Datasheet / Whitepaper / TLDR);
• Trace Mayer promotes Proof ofKeys ”(Proof of Key Ownership), to minimize the risk of re-laying, conduct an ecosystem stress test and remind new users of their own sovereignty;
• Blockstream allows you to make bitcoin transactions via satellites. Everything becomes even more interesting in combination with a mesh network topology;
• New metrics for measuring the performance of cryptocurrencies are emerging, such as realized capitalization, economic throughput, economic density ($ / bytes) and MVRV;
• The peak of mining centralization has been completed (bye, Bym, Bitmain);
• The Coinshares report says that 74% of the energy consumption for Bitcoin mining is provided by renewable sources;
• The new paper scrappers, "standing on the shoulders of the giants," are trying to describe Bitcoin in original ways;

Over time, stories evolve as Bitcoin continues to reveal itself (to itself? To itself?) To curious viewers.

The Waves Went Druv Bansal, co-founder of Unchained Capital

In the end, the market reaches the bottom. Hodlers cling to each other like Brothers in Arms, creating a solid foundation that can withstand future growth.

“Hodlers are revolutionaries” - Dan Held.

As scullers accumulate more and morebitcoins, “float” (the number of bitcoins in active trade) is becoming more and more limited. With a decrease in the available offer, each new user puts more pressure on the price towards its increase. As prices rise, the media draws public attention to this, which attracts new users to Bitcoin, and soon we will again find ourselves in the next cycle of hype.

Section No. 2: Mycophobia, Maria Sabina and the cult of Satoshi

Sometimes people say that cryptocurrency can become"Object of worship." Such an opinion is at the same time true and brings positive points. Before we move on to the religious trends of Bitcoin, I suggest you look deep into the history of the relationship between humanity and mushrooms and learn something useful.

The modern Western world was struck by "mycophobia"- irrational fear of mushrooms. People are afraid of everything that they don’t understand, and let's face it: most people think that mushrooms are “vegetables”.

Mushrooms seem strange. They represent the life cycle of inconstancy, which people subconsciously fear. Faced with our own mortality is not a joke at all, it is better to just avoid it.

However, this was not always the case. In fact, people have had a relationship with mushrooms for a long time. From food to medicine, to superstitions and religious artifacts. Mushrooms can save your life, kill you, feed you, and even change your mind.

Anthropological evidence suggeststhat people who partnered with mushrooms had an evolutionary advantage. As more and more people understand mushrooms (and Bitcoin), they will soon realize how important they can be.

People who have allied with mushrooms have an evolutionary advantage.

For survival in the alpine mountains of northern Italyancient man relied on mushrooms. At Etzi, the “ice man” who died about 5,300 years ago, two mushrooms (amada and birch polypore) were found in their belongings, attached to leather laces. One of the mushrooms was used to make fire, and the other, as it later turned out, was a kind of medicine against parasites found in its entrails.

(a source)

Even 19,000 years ago, a woman who apparently possesseddubbed the Red Lady, she used mushrooms, as evidenced by spores extracted from her teeth. Whether these mushrooms were intended for food, religious purposes, or for something else is not known.

One of the oldest cave paintingsestimated to be more than 6,000 years old, was discovered in Northern Algeria. This painting depicts a “mushroom shaman with a bee’s face” holding mushrooms in his hands. Also, mushrooms grow throughout his body.

Rock painting: "Mushroom shaman with a bee's face." C. 4000 BC

In Siberia, Koryak, the indigenous population of Kamchatka,they worshiped the mushroom "red fly agaric" (Amanita Muscaria), which is the same cult "red-white" mushroom, glorified in the films "Super Mario Brothers" and "Alice in Wonderland." The Koryaks seemed to love the fly agarics so much that they drank the urine of people and deer who had recently eaten this mushroom. Apparently, such urine retains the desired effects even with repeated processing up to 5 times. How they discovered this phenomenon is another question ...

Now put on your foil hat - our Christmas traditions may also be inspired by the fly agaric.

In Masatec culture from modern Mexico andtoday this mushroom is revered as sacred. This culture was recently discovered by Gordon Wasson, about which he spoke in detail in the famous article, entitled “In Search of Magic Mushrooms” and was published in Life magazine in 1955. Many tourists have since visited this region in Mexico, trying to learn from the famous mushroom shaman Maria Sabina and her relatives.

Mushroom artifacts from Central America

Certainly, mushrooms aroused interest in our ancestors.

Bitcoin Awakens Similar Quasi-Religious Zeal

Brilliantly described by Yuval NoahHarari) “Homo sapiens” has the unique ability to flexibly collaborate in large teams. This allows us to agree together on abstract concepts such as nations, gods and money.

Just as people formed religious cults around the mushroom, one of the options for describing Bitcoin is a neo-monetary religious movement.

The riddle of Satoshi has laid a solid foundation conducive to the emergence of religious trends.

Bitcoin was created through the immaculate conception of a mythical character (Satoshi), who later sacrificed himself for the common good.

Satoshi cult inspires some fanaticsdevote your life to promoting the good news. Not all bitcoiners fall into the same religious sect. Some followers cling to an ancient religious text (whiterpiper), while others interpret Satoshi's vision through his early forum posts.

Disagreement over priorities about whichBitcoin's scaling debate suggests that it led to hard forks and a split in “religious communities.” Which is not much different from the way Martin Luther, who split the Catholic Church, posted the “Ninety-Five Theses” on the doors of the church in 1517.

Roger Ver was known as“Bitcoin-Jesus” from the first days of its activity in the field of cryptocurrencies, spreading the “good news”, and endowing “restaurant owners” infected with fiat by “satoshi”.

Messianic figures such as Faketoshi (CraigWright / Craig Wright) appear, claiming that they are real Satoshi Nakamoto. Faketoshi, being a fundamentalist, refers to his sacrament as “a vision of Satoshi,” the only true Bitcoin, as set out in the “Bible” (Bitcoin’s White Paper).

“Details of the functionality are not described in the whitepaper, but the source code will be provided soon” - Satoshi Nakamoto

It doesn't matter how incomplete that whitepaper wasor how many mistakes it made, Faketoshi claims that his fork from the fork is a real “Satoshi vision”. Even if the fork of Faketoshi WAS closest to Satoshi's initial vision (which was not so), does this really matter?

The answer is no. Bitcoin's essence is closely linked to the ever-evolving social consensus surrounding its protocol.

Each rival sect is a competing social contract.

Bitcoin's social contract is built around a few simple rules. These agreed rules (Schelling's point) are then ratified in the Bitcoin protocol automating social consensus.

Bitcoin Rules: 1. No forfeiture 2. No censorship 3. No inflation 4. Anyone can check the rules from 1st to 3rd. : Hasu Bitcoin Social Contract

Let's take the greats as an examplescaling debate. " One group (BCH) believed that we should focus on “cheap payments” through “decentralization”, while another (BTC) believed that we should prioritize “decentralization” at a basic level and scale payments out of the chain.

Being a rival religious sect, a gang ofBitcoinCash was free to create its own fork of the Bitcoin code and test its hypothesis on it. A year later, it became clear that the social consensus surrounding Bitcoin does not agree with the BCH approach, as the market does not attach value to BCH or any other fork.

Bitcoin detractors will even be able to say that "the split of the Bitcoin code inflates the sentence."

However, this is like saying «When Zimbabwe prints more money, it devalues ​​the US dollar.» [thanks Murad]

In case of unsuccessful branching of BCash, theythey copied the code (Bitcoin protocol), but could not mobilize people (social level), which led to the receipt of an asset with a relatively low cost. This is a prime example of how Bitcoin opposes corruption by attackers, requiring social consensus to change network settings.

In other words, Bitcoin replaces social assumptions with mathematical assumptions. We will delve into the implications that this has for our social scalability in the third part (* Translation of the remaining parts will appear on BitNews soon *)

Religious fanaticism — Is this an indicator of future success?

We are now witnessing how a new scarce product monetizes in real time. Not a single living person has witnessed such a phenomenon.

In order to really accomplish this,the collective consciousness of the planet must change. Convincing people that money is not a green paper and that they should not come from our government will take time.

In order to overcome the inevitable difficulties,necessary to create a new world reserve currency, some “religious zeal” may be required. As each new student turns to the cult of Satoshi, the chances of hyper bitcoinization increase.

However, there are risks of Bitcoin being overly politicized. [Thank youHasu]

Some fractions of the community portray Bitcoin.as a club for Austrian economists who only eat meat that they personally shot from one of their many rifles. Although these things are good and beautiful, they are not prerequisites for being a bitcoiner. Let's not confuse these two options at the cost of scaring away potential bitcoin miners.

Now be sure to convince all your friends andfamily read the New Testament (“Bitcoin Standard: A Decentralized Alternative to Central Banks”) at least twice before setting off on their next crusade against fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Good cults have every incentive to preach their teachings.

Money is the final result of a communication system - its value is determined by the number of people with whom you can interact.

In Bitcoin, he not only captures the imaginationuser in a religious sense, but also has financial incentives to attract new members to the community. With every new user who buys Bitcoins, the value of Bitcoin increases in the forward direction, benefiting previous scammers. Then this new user receives an incentive to convert his friends to the new faith. Which then convert their friends. And the cycle continues.

As prices rise, incentives appear to increase security, as evidenced by the adjustment of complexity - one of the most ingenious factors introduced by Satoshi.

The price is rising → mining is becoming more profitable → more and more miners are contributing to the hash power → security is improving, increasing the value of Bitcoin.

The mushroom is growing

If the bear market blues makes you frown, just look underground. There are countless events (some of which are listed above) that are encouraging.

Downtrend: Digital Gold
Uptrend: Digital Slime Mushroom

The bitcoin mushroom grows quietly underground.

Every day, Bitcoin is gaining more and more space from Fiat, becoming more reliable, more decentralized and more consistent with the Lindy effect.

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.

Conclusion

Did you like the second part? Check out the third part, where we explore Bitcoin as an antivirus for today's financial system. Here is a link to the first part of the cycle in case you missed it.

* Translation of the remaining parts will appear on BitNews soon *

Announcement of the third part: Bitcoin is an inevitable consequencethe desire of nature for complexity of a higher order. Bitcoin, as a means of transmitting data with a minimum level of trust, will penetrate all corners of our globe. This unshakable foundation allows us to build a more socially scalable society - a prerequisite if we are going to coordinate our actions on a global level to reach new heights of human achievement in terms of coordinated interaction in the political and environmental spheres, tracking external factors and even turning into a multi-planetary view .

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