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I wouldn't call Bitcoin (or, perhaps, "Bitcoinism") a religion, although it may seemingly share some similarities with religion, mostly attributed to Bitcoin by those who don't understand it. It is not a religion, because it is based on objectively true, real-world, physical, repeatable, verifiable processes (i.e., math & science)
I can see that you are serious, especially since you use maths and sciences in the singular.
Haha, I was thinking of putting
"TM" next to "math & science"...
, and does not rely at all on dogma or faith in a metaphysical set of principles.
There's gotta be some faith in there, even though there is a lot of laden maths and science.. I am not going to deny the existence of maths and science, yet one interesting thing about bitcoin is that it has some ways in which it ties back to human behavior, human incentives, which is the proof of work part that can be gamed and manipulated, but it would have a lot of difficulties to overcome the built in incentives and even the presumptions that man will work in his self-interest.
Sure, many of us likely realize that satoshi came up with something that must be very close to a perfect design, but bitcoin is still man made and likely and invention and a discovery all at the same time.
Even the traditional (and scientifically acceptable) notion of "trust" is taken out of the picture ("Don't trust, verify!"),
remember the Regan statement. Trust, but verify. We have to have some of that going on, too. Surely not every normie is going to want to or be able to run a node, so we have to have some trust and faith that some of the open source aspects of bitcoin are going to be checked-and-balanced by some other people who have the skills to do the checking (the crowd sourcing idea) and if enough eyes are on bitcoin, then likely any flaws that exist are going to mostly get fixed... maybe not perfectly, but perfectly enough.. and surely the older people might not be able to change careers and learn how to code and to check code, but we still have to figure out the extent to which we are going to run some of the software and the extent to which are going to try to verify some of the matters for ourselves, to the extent that we are able to verify, and maybe those difficulties to verify matters scare away some of the older people, but some younger people may well be more than willing to go down the road of learning some of those kinds of bitcoin-related things.
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Not disagreeing with the above, or any part of your post, but I'd like to add a comment. All things considered, yes, there
is an element of faith involved. A kind of faith that has always been there. Faith in humanity, perhaps? There's definitely some degree of faith in the Bitcoin code, in the sense that you're describing, i.e., faith in some competent coder(s) or institution(s) discovering (and disclosing) bugs or even backdoors that could compromise Bitcoin. This is unavoidable. We are all bound to this. We can't know everything about everything, so we trust the experts. And the more experts get involved, and the more time a piece of code is out there, verified, scrutinized, attacked, the more that faith gets transformed into fact. Not 100% in the rigorous, mathematical sense, it's not a proof, but pretty close. I see this as a kind of Darwinian law. Let it loose in the wild and see if it survives. Considering the fact that its market cap is nearly one trillion USD as we speak, it wouldn't be able to survive for so long if there was a fundamental flaw in the code.
This is certainly not the kind of faith that is related to religion, where people blindly trust a single person or small group of people, who died hundreds or thousands of years ago in most cases, and who have said some pretty crazy, illogical, unprovable stuff, unprovable even by using the law of large numbers, so to speak...
Returning to where this discussion originally started, I don't think an informed coiner has any reason to be bitter, toxic or aggressive towards nocoiners, aside from the occasional Bat-slap, rusty pipe, and other amusing funzies and mindrustenings. For one thing, a coiner, depending on the size of his/her stash, is likely not going to need to be bothered by the opinions of others in this matter. A bit of disappointment, perhaps, an urge to spread the word, maybe, but no bitterness, no hate.
Just look at the price: $42,208 as I type this. How can you not believe? LOL
Edit: Improved layout & syntax, added some text.
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