https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/25/crypto-means-cryptotheology/

Cryptocurrencies are a religion as much as they are a technology. They almost have to be, given their adherents’ gargantuan ambition of fundamentally changing how the world works. This means they attract charlatans, lunatics, frauds, and false prophets, and furious battles are waged over doctrinal hairspliitting; but it also means they inspire intransigent beliefs which can, and do, unify many thousands of wildly different people across continents and time zones.

This occurred to me while I was rereading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, as one does, and in particular its depictions of the early days of the Christian faith: