[skinkestek]

> Very soon everything can be cryptographically proven to have existed, stopping people from rewriting history and denying things like The Holocaust etc

Sounds nice, but my gut feeling is that you wildly underestimate how far people will go to work around anything that could change their beliefs.

This seems to hold true on all sides of the political spectrum, in art as as well as in science and the only difference is what beliefs people stick to.

As a deeply religious person this might come of as really ironic and the irony is not lost on me: quite the contrary and for that reason I've thought about it multiple times.

[diablo1]

Rigid, ingrained beliefs can't beat a math problem

[carapace]

Did you hear about the man who believed he was dead? His doctor tried everything but couldn't convince him he wasn't a corpse. Finally, in exasperation, the doctor says, "Look, corpses don't bleed right?"

The man agrees, "Yeah, corpses don't bleed."

The doctor pokes him in the arm with a needle and blood wells up.

The man looks at his bleeding arm in astonishment and says, "I'll be damned! Corpses do bleed!"

(This is a true story. I think it's in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" IIRC.)