Religions only work if they saturate the life of the believers. Without universalism they lose their utility and their rationale. If you flip it around, the way to identify a religion or a theodicy is to see if it is all consuming. If the people espousing a particular point of view judge everything within the context of that point of view, then you’re dealing with a religion of some sort.

This strange article on Bitcoin is a good example.

Nathaniel Popper’s new book, Digital Gold, is as close as you can get to being the definitive account of the history of Bitcoin. As its subtitle proclaims, the book tells the story of the “misfits” (the first generation of hacker-libertarians) and “millionaires” (the second generation of Silicon Valley venture capitalists) who were responsible for building Bitcoin, mining it, hyping it, and, in at least some cases, getting rich off it.

The tale is selective, of course: not everybody involved with Bitcoin talked to Popper, and the identity of Bitcoin’s inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, remains a mystery. But Popper did talk to most of the important people in the cryptocurrency crowd, and he tells me that he put real effort into trying “to find a woman who was involved in some substantive way”.

The result of that search? Zero. Nothing. Zilch. Popper’s book features no female principals at all: the sole role of women in the book is as wives and girlfriends.

To a non-moonbat, this is nutty as squirrel poop. What sort of diseased mind cares about the sexual demographics of Bitcoin’s founders? The answer is the Modern American Moonbat. The MAM’s are obsessed with their crotch the crotch of everyone else. It’s all they can think about all the time.

There are nasty consequences of this. If you are a woman involved with Bitcoin, you are invariably going to get treated like an outsider. As Victoria Turk says, “it seems that the only Bitcoin community that particularly welcomes female participation is the NSFW subreddit r/GirlsGoneBitcoin”, which is basically a site where women get paid in cryptocurrency to pose nude.

I’ll just note that Bitcoin went from weird technological hobby to social statement to mass movement rather quickly. Bitcoin meetups? Bitcoin clubs? Replace Bitcoin with “small denomination bills” and you see why this is weird.

Men make up an estimated 96% of the Bitcoin community, which means that if Bitcoin does end up succeeding, as its adherents think it will, and if the people who own Bitcoin see their holdings soar in value, then all of the profits will end up going to what Brett Scott calls the “crypto-patriarchy”. Not many men, to be sure: as Charlie Stross says, the degree of inequality in the Bitcoin economy “is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia”. But it’s not many men, and effectively zero women.

That’s why the MAM’s are calling in the SJW’s to attack the cult of Bitcoin. They suspect it is a deviationist sect orchestrated by the Pale Penis People to undermine the progress of the One True Faith.