Canto VI: The Armies That Do Not Combat
The faithful of both gods wage narrative and meme wars while the kings had already made peace.
But if the kings had agreed in silence, their armies (oh, their armies!) continued marching against each other in battles of words and memes and price charts that none of them completely understood. Bitcoin maximalists, those who used orange hashtags and called everything not Bitcoin altcoin garbage, marched with the certainty of those who believe they possess the only truth in a cosmos of multiple truths.
In forums, in comments, in live YouTube streams where mortals with shaking cameras debated which blockchain is superior, the priests of Asgard proclaimed: Ethereum is securities fraud waiting to happen. TRON is centralized blockchain of a charlatan. Solana is venture capital blockchain that will die the next time the market falls. Only Bitcoin is real. Only Bitcoin is decentralized. Only Bitcoin is sacred.
The altcoiners, believers in TRON, Solana, Ethereum, answered with their own sacred fury: Bitcoin is outdated! I see it for what it is, digital gold for the rich who already have enough gold. Ethereum is the world computer. Solana processes more transactions in one second than Bitcoin in a day. The future is speed, not rigidity. The maximalists are the last dinosaurs to realize the asteroid has already arrived.
And that conflict, that relentless, infinite conflict of narratives, was more real than any battle with swords and blood. For true wars of the 21st century are not waged with weapons, they are waged with frames. With who defines the terms of debate. With who can make the most mortals believe that their partial vision is the complete vision. They are wars of imagination. And in these wars, both armies were simultaneously victorious and defeated, for each conquered its own audience while failing to convert the other's.
What the armies did not know, and what the kings knew since the dialogue on Bifrost, was that the war was unnecessary. That the cosmos was large enough. That a mortal buying Bitcoin did not prevent another mortal from using Solana. That a developer building on Ethereum did not destroy a Bitcoin holder. The two pantheons were not mutually exclusive. They were mutually complementary. And the energy spent on war could have been spent on building, but armies rarely learn that lesson before the kings.
They are wars of imagination. In them, both armies win and lose simultaneously.