Crypto-escapism is a religion and should be afforded the same protections as any religion

Crypto-escapism and different interpretations of technology

There are different ways to interpret technology. Some interpret technology in the most practical and pragmatic way. In this interpretation there isn't the same level of zealotry or rigid ideological concerns. In the crypto community the pragmatists often are most concerned with mainstream adoption, price, what the technology can do to improve business, productivity, security, as crypto tech is seen merely as a means to an end. The less pragmatic more ideological will be concerned about immutability, decentralization, code is law, censorship resistance, etc.

The pragmatic interpretation

When I coined the phrase: "measurably beneficial decentralization" it is from the pragmatic perspective. There is no faith in blockchain, in decentralization, in crypto, or any of the ideological lineages when making this statement. The statement puts all value assessments to the community to decide while the developer simply builds according to these decisions.

The statement is broken down into that which can be given a positive value must be measurable. If we cannot measure the benefit of something then we cannot measure the value. So valuable decentralization is and must always be the decentralization which shows some measurable benefit.

Benefit to what? This is where pragmatists differ. It depends on your goals. But one thing pragmatists have in common is that the goals or requirements are separate and distinct from the means of achieving them. Decentralization may help or hurt in the achievement of a goal. We could call these goals or requirements our initial axioms for example or we can just create a mission statement which we seek to fulfill.

The crypto-escapist interpretation

Crypto-escapism on the other hand is about hope for the future. While the pragmatic stance which I take may be helpful for building a technology toward some goal the actual creative use cases come from the dreamers. The people who are ideological, who are religious, who are passionate, are the ones who have the reason to form a community in the first place. While the pragmatic developer might be focused on how to satisfy the requirements to grow the community the crypto-escapists are the users and participants in many cases.

To provide an example, in some cases people believe rather than know. To know something means it has been tested scientifically. To believe just requires having some faith. People who believe for example could say blockchain technology can be used to replace the current voting system. In my opinion this is an example of crypto-escapism because while it may be possible some day to achieve this it is not currently where the technology is. So a project like FollowMyVote is not likely to ever achieve something in the pragmatic sense until the technology catches up with the ideology/religious beliefs.

The heavily ideological beliefs about radical privacy vs radical transparency

I would also say that some of the views I see both on privacy and on transparency (particularly the radical variety) also have this religious tone to them. Whenever someone is promoting absolute transparency or absolute privacy without offering data to support it? This is likely a belief rather than a conclusion arrived at from evidence to meet some requirement. If we look for example at EOS we can see there is a constitution but again it's not the constitution which matters but the actual code. Whatever the code allows is what is actually possible in the pragmatic sense while the constitution provided is belief supported.

My thoughts on this are that we can interpret some aspects of the crypto community as being religiously devoted to the blockchain or to technology. Crypto-escapism in a sense is the ideological/religious devotion to certain principles rather than to the achievement of certain outcomes. So for example the idea of immutability is very much a religious tone. It's an absolute devotion to an idea or ideal called immutability based on "code as law". This is not how the pragmatist would think about it.

The pragmatic view of service to the community

A pragmatist would start with only one ideal which is to serve the community, the customer, the user, the people. From this one duty the pragmatist would then collect data to determine what they want at different points in time and then deliver the technology to supply the need. In other words the pragmatist would see themselves primarily as a service provider while the crypto-escapist may see themselves as defending certain principles. The pragmatist does not for example determine the evolutionary trajectory of a project. The pragmatist puts it into the hands of the community to decide how the project and it's code evolves so that the evolutionary trajectory always fits the needs of the community.

So in this case the problem of small blocks vs large blocks would have an objective solution for the pragmatist. That would be whichever solves the problem in the way where the trade offs suffered are the least painful and most beneficial to the community. A developer from a pragmatist perspective would not make the case that "large blocks threaten decentralization" because decentralization isn't necessarily the main goal. For the pragmatist the main goal is to grow the community just as for a government the main goal is to grow GDP or to a company the main goal is to maximize profit for shareholders. In other words the pragmatist would have to weigh future economic growth potential (opportunity cost) against political ideology/religious conviction.

If the blockchain is like a church then the true believers should be treated as religious practitioners

In the case where the blockchain is more a religion then the case can easily be made that the original whitepaper is the equivalent to a constitution or very similar. This means people will be debating for decades what Satoshi Nakamoto really wanted Bitcoin to be rather than what Bitcoin ought to become in order to achieve the most adoption (grow the biggest community). In my opinion if people do decide to take on a religious perspective then legally the blockchain could be seen as a church and be treated as a church. The participants in the blockchain who do so as part of religious practice should be protected.