A bit of historical research was making the rounds on social media recently, a monograph that compares the 21st century emergence of Bitcoin, encryption, the internet and millennials with the Protestant Reformation that shook Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. The two events have similar dynamics, argues Tuur Demeester, whose white paper, "The Bitcoin Reformation," is packed with bold predictions about the crypto and blockchain future, such as, "Bitcoin savers could accelerate a revolution in the history of thought." "The main thesis of 'The Bitcoin Reformation' is that there are four fundamental parallels between the Protestant Reformation and the present day, which could signal profound societal and economic changes ahead.". Still, Demeester's 23-part Twitter summary of The Bitcoin Reformation prompted 435 retweets and over 1000 likes.

"I'm struggling to see how you put millennials and Bitcoin into the same basket. Millennials tend to care the most of any generation about the environment. Bitcoin doesn't align with this." The comparison with the Protestant revolution was useful in raising the Bitcoin conversation to its proper level, according to him.

Overall as much as one might delight in historical analogies, the real problem, as the author of The Bitcoin Reformation himself acknowledges, is that secular trends are often only visible in hindsight.