Bitcoin and Hermes

Statue of Odin in Hannover

Germanic tribesmen thought their chief god Odin matched up with the Mediterranean civilizations' god Hermes or Mercury. This idea is captured in the names of the days of the week, Odin's day is Wednesday, which is Miercoles (Mercury's day) in Spanish.

Arguably Hermes, still, is the chief god of the Western world in his various guises. His signs and symbols are everywhere (e.g. the caduceus). As a consequence, the mythology related to Hermes is vast and varied. The character plays an important role in many of the classical mythological stories. As Hermes Trismegistus he shows up in the mythology of the major monotheist religions today.

As stated in the previous post, it's possible the name Satoshi Nakamoto ("quick witted"/"of the center") is an allusion to Hermes. (Some speculate it's an allusion to the CIA) Hermes role in classical mythology is as the wing-footed messenger of the gods, intelligence, writing and eloquence, and boundaries, and much more. Perhaps a neat summarizing phrase is intelligence in action.

Buffy and Giles

Hermes is one of the most beloved characters when he's translated into science fiction and action adventure movies. The audience of those movies and TV shows is probably difficult to distinguish from the bitcoin community. His role in SciFi is, generally, to serve as a helper to the hero of the story by providing him or her (think Buffy and Giles) with the knowledge or tools they need to win. He can get involved in the action himself, but usually only reluctantly.

Much of the language of the bitcoin community is drawn from the SciFi, and hence the mythological, tradition. Using bitcoin is considered an act of rebellion versus an overwhelming Empire. To a certain extent that's true, however, I think implicit in that language of rebellion is a strong assumption that the status quo is winning and will win without the aid of supernatural forces. That is, falling into the language of a heroic struggle also inflates the adversary. It also creates false expectations and ideas, for example, that the truth will win out, or light will always triumph over darkness and might obscure what needs to be done to really effect change.

An understanding of mythology can help people see patterns of thought and behavior that are deeply ingrained in us all, and so allows us to get a few degrees closer to reality, and act accordingly.

Bitcoin and the Frontier

Many people in the alternative research/alternative media community see money as a prime method of control of the masses. The realities of debt money are shocking to anyone who investigates the subject--our future productivity is sold to us by banks whose role in any transaction seems to be completely parasitic and arbitrary.

The alternative media has been a forum for discussing concrete solutions to this problem. One obvious solution is to issue our own currency. Local currencies (see Ithaca Hours as one example) are an attempt to eliminate debt money. In 18th/19th century America, settlers community-financed houses and businesses and didn't rely on money at all, and instead used goods or hours of labor as currency. However current application of any of these methods barely make a hair-fine scratch in the market for Federal Reserve Notes, aka US Dollars.

If you delve into the money problem, you'll find currency and banking are only one component, maybe just a small component. I think this great article on salt as a currency and commodity illuminates the problem. Today, we consider salt to be all but worthless. It's readily available everywhere. There seems to be a never ending supply. In fact there's a super abundance of salt that diets of people in the western world include far too much of it, and it contributes to chronic health problems.

However, that wasn't always the case. Venice maintained a salt trade monopoly in Europe for hundreds of years. While salt wasn't exactly scarce, it was vital, and households needed it in larger quantities than we do today because it was used to preserve food when there was no refrigeration. Control of a vital commodity (e.g. petroleum) either militarily, or more subtly through monopoly of a market creates a financial system. That is, political power translates into financial power, not the other way around.

Another important element, which is really the subject of this blog, is control of the mind. When a token is used for money, that is, as a stand in for real wealth, people need to agree that it's valuable, that it's worth fighting and dying for.

Bitcoin is a relatively new entrant into this game. As the currency of people with no political or military control of vital resources (except computing power; maybe it becomes backed by CPU cycles, storage, and other computational commodities), it can only gain market share by convincing people to use it. Consequently, it relies on exploiting story telling and mythology to get traction in the market.

Many bitcoin fans slip into mythological or archetypal roles without realizing it. Bitcoin is something they conceive of as outside The City's walls, and participating in bitcoin, usually just buying and selling it on exchanges while paying high fees and potentially incurring tax liabilities, is like a ticket into this wild space, something that signifies membership in The Rebellion.

It seems like there are two Patron deities of Bitcoin--Hermes and Apollo. Indeed, the name of Bitcoin's mythological founder Satoshi Nakamoto seems to be an allusion to Hermes. Satoshi, apparently meaning "quick witted", and "Nakamoto" means "of the center". Hermes is the quick, clever god who's the intermediary between gods and men. Bitcoin's seen as a replacement for a completely corrupt system. Adherents see its purity, its mathematical, Apollonian purity, as preferable to the glad-handing political corruption that surrounds our present  financial system.

I'll dive into these associations more in future posts.