Dan Larimer, the co-founder of BitShares, Steem and EOS, is not well. Is there anyone here who used to be close to @dan and can contact him tomorrow, if the world doesn't end today in a nuclear ICBM attack on the United States from Russia, China and Iran? Because that's what he's predicting.
I like how he writes YHWH, the name of God, in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. He isn't just posting on Hive, Twitter and Medium, he even tweeted he had a "full professionally edited film" made about his prophecy, which has 4.5 million views on YouTube:
It's over an hour long, I didn't watch all of it. That's not how I'd want to spend my last day alive. Apparently, Dan's gotten deeper and deeper into religion since June 2023. He also wrote a 200-page Biblical Tribulation Survival Guide for this day. Now I'm not going to argue about the details of his prophecy – I'll keep working on a translation job with a deadline at 9 AM on Thursday. What I'm worried about is how Dan and his followers are going to react tomorrow when we all survive (except some people in Florida and war zones as well as the usual death rate across the world).
What typically happens after prophecies fail is that the believers who don't drop out of the cult will become even more fanatical, in order to convince themselves that they didn't devote their whole life to a mistake after all. It's the most intense form of coping you could imagine. This is what led psychologists to describe cognitive dissonance, a phenomenon which we're familiar with at a less dramatic level in crypto communities.
But unfortunately, depression or suicide is also a possible response. Despite leafing through the survival guide, I'm not quite sure what Dan is doing to prepare for this moment. I'm not hearing anything about giving back or giving away the money he made from the EOS ICO, despite abandoning the project. (Update: He did ask for suggestions for online charity projects.) Of course, he's being mocked on Crypto Twitter. I won't join the mockery. Hive couldn't exist without Dan, and this isn't the first person I care about who's going off the rails in a religious context. It's hard to deal with, and I think the only thing you can do is to stay in touch, to help them stay connected to humanity and reality.