I appreciate the conspicuous nonchalance of opening with “it is not a difficult task to find a metaphor for the Bitcoin phenomenon in the realm of opera” to start a footnote that takes half a page and is only very tangentially related to the paragraph thus annotated, to draw a simile that is itself kind of a stretch (like the Rheingold is as virtual as bitcoin because it’s never seen, but it’s also physically a part of Valhalla by being imbued in the bricks? and is this whole long digression only to say that Bitcoin may go up in flames like Valhala, that’s it that’s the metaphor? both are things that end?)

like real Herman Melville “lemme tell you about whales for a sec” infodump energy

judges, evidently

I had to do a double take here and read the whole transcript to the Wagner reference. I have not seen a reference to Wagner outside of Hitler’s obsession with Wagner’s compositions.