• Crypto Winter 2022 Cost Bitcoin ($BTC) Holders More Than Cash

    at its most basic, crypto does resemble a cult. i supposed that at this point in the arc of capitalism it shouldn’t be surprising to me that we have a financialization cults. i don’t know if this has ever really been a thing before. i suspect the evangelical prosperity gospel comes reasonably close here.

    either way, this bit was particularly on point:

    In their seminal 1956 social psychology study, When Prophecy Fails, Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter described how followers of a doomsday cult responded when their prophet’s precise predictions of apocalypse turned out to be false: They just pushed the date back. Some became even stronger believers and proselytized more. They’d already committed too much, perhaps quitting their jobs or giving away money, to accept that there was nothing to it. The study became a classic example of the “cognitive dissonance” that occurs when evidence contradicts one’s model of the world.

    i’ve been tracking crypto so peripherally lately that i had missed the emergence of AI tokens. this is an interesting twist on things.

    still, it seems some are still waiting for an oracle to emerge.

    – 20240813: pointer to tweet removed