Christians and Bitcoin: The new frontier of faith and technology



Enough time has elapsed since Bitcoin hit the landmark $100,000 value — and hovered around that point ever since — to make some recommendations to those who have kept their distance from the most important cryptocurrency in the world. Buckle up!

Of course, the disclaimer states that this is not financial advice. The twist is that what follows is, in a perhaps unexpected way, spiritual advice.

The most important thing to understand about Bitcoin is that it’s not just another measure or “store” of value.

But, of course, all Americans ought to see that America ceases to be America if it’s not America in cyberspace.

The entrenched financial elite want you to limit your interactions with and ideas about Bitcoin. For them, the ideal is adding Bitcoin to their pre-existing basket of financial assets and instruments — just another set of numbers on a spreadsheet that they can convince people to buy in to. Not only does this approach allow them to control your interactions with Bitcoin and your ideas about it, it also allows them to control YOU with Bitcoin.

That’s because Bitcoin truly is much more than “digital gold” — it’s a universal computational protocol that all but immutably preserves the information valued most by whoever uses it. And whoever uses it is determined not by casual choice but by “proof of work” — making the effort to expend energy on having a computer successfully compete to solve a math problem before others do.

What’s more, Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency. Those who merely hoard Bitcoin are, in that sense, misusing it. Bitcoin permits ordinary people to create markets and exchanges for goods and services without having to use the legacy financial system that has frustrated Americans so much over the past decades and enriched itself wildly in the process. Using Bitcoin in this way epitomizes the American way of commercial and cultural life.

Christians often recall the parable of the talents as one of Jesus’ most simple and powerful teachings. God gives us spiritual treasure and expects us to use it to make a spiritual profit, not just for ourselves but especially for one another. Those who bury their spiritual treasure out of fear that the Lord will be angry if we make a bad investment might be “rational” in their application of the precautionary principle, but they are failing to understand the economics of grace and salvation in a way that will lead them not to spiritual security but to spiritual ruin.

This is the way to understand Bitcoin. There’s nothing wrong with buying Bitcoin to participate in the re-founding of American financial and economic life on a footing appropriate to our technological development. It might even get you and your friends “rich” — or at least keep you in the game.

But if you stop there, it’s like burying your spiritual treasure and deluding yourself that you’ll be saved because you watch its ticker value trend up every day. Americans can only keep themselves American with regard to Bitcoin by treating Bitcoin the way Americans have traditionally and customarily treated their technology — confidently, competently, and constructively, in ways that mix the competitive and the collaborative into a dynamic and fruitful compound. Get Bitcoin and use it! Or else people, countries, ideologies, or cults that don’t like you very much are very likely to use it to control or even punish you.

That’s true for all Americans, but it goes double for American Christians. Christians choose willingly to become the servants of God — not of the world, where the rules favor those who do whatever it takes to get ahead and stay there. Amoral or immoral power obviously gravitates toward money as a lever for increasing pleasure and control.

Christians aren’t supposed to do that. On the contrary, they’re supposed to labor spiritually in the world on behalf of God and for his sake. Christians who refuse to bring this way of life to the realm of technology will find themselves on the losing end of the great spiritual war playing out in the visible and invisible worlds, the digital world very much included.

Yes, it can be confusing and tempting to venture outside one’s comfort zone into the murky and fast-moving world of tech. But Bitcoin is special. Although it’s one of the most potent technologies in the world, it’s not very difficult to understand or use, and it can be used right now to build enterprises that can strengthen our way of life, our form of government, and our humanity itself. On that all-important basis, the benefits of AI and other cutting-edge technologies just can't compare to Bitcoin's potential.

In fact, Bitcoin is so potent that it carries inherent danger — the danger of “eating the world,” as many say software has already done, and falling into the hands of a single amoral or immoral master or masters bent on perfecting a globalist system where Christ and God himself are seemingly disappeared from our past, present, and future. All the more reason why Christians will especially want to discipline Bitcoin like a well-trained beast of burden.

But of course, all Americans ought to see that America ceases to be America if it’s not America in cyberspace. That means Bitcoin must be more than just another technology dominated by the United States government. It must be bent toward our best purposes and away from our worst temptations — not by law, but by use, in what Alexis de Tocqueville memorably described as the reciprocal action of one heart upon the other.

The spiritual riches that result from this approach to Bitcoin are even better than the material riches caused by “number go up.” They’re good for America, good for you, and good for your fellow Americans. Try this — after you buy — and watch our country soar.

Free Samourai: The deep state's attack on Bitcoin



Last month, the United States Department of Justice arrested two men for operating a money-transmitting business utilized, it said, to launder money for criminals in amounts upwards of $100 million. These men are currently being charged by the Southern District of New York, one of whom is already incarcerated on the East Coast of the United States. At the same time, the other was apprehended in Portugal and will likely be extradited imminently. Ok. So what? Presumably, people get arrested all the time for laundering money — why should you care about these two guys? What makes this any different from the run-of-the-mill financial crimes often spotlighted on your favorite true-crime podcast or some NPR bulletin?

Well, these men didn't transfer any money and weren't running a money-transmitting business. Secondly, they weren't using money at all — not in the sense defined by previous precedents in the U.S. court systems. The two men accused were the open-source developers behind a popular Bitcoin wallet called Samourai that simply allows users to coordinate the timing of the publication of their transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain to help obfuscate the revealing of certain payment details when settling on an open ledger. You've most likely heard of Bitcoin by now, with its anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, and its legion of ardent supporters who can never seem to shut up about it. But what is Bitcoin, and why have regulatory bodies such as the SEC, the CFTC, and the DOJ — not to mention the House and the Senate — continued to bring it up in their discourse about the state of the economy?

Bitcoin is speech. Jailing those who write code that dares to facilitate the exchange of 1s and 0s to update a ledger is an attack on free speech, on everyone and everything this country supposedly stands for.

Bitcoin is a database, decentralized in write permissions and distributed among the node operators spread across the planet. Every Bitcoin transaction is simply an entry inscribed into the most recent state of a ledger, known as the blockchain. Each block is filled with thousands of new data entries, with each transaction consisting of three basic components: an input (where the coin comes from), an output (where the coin is going), and cryptographic signatures that ensure the sender has a claim to the coin being sent. But in reality, nothing is really “sent” at all.

Unlike your checking account, there are no accounts, or even balances, native to Bitcoin. A piece of wallet software written to interact with the Bitcoin network can tally up the coin held by a certain Bitcoin address and make the appearance of an account balance, but it is much more akin to the wallet in your back pocket stuffed full of differing denominations of bills — two 1s, two 5s, a 10, and a 20 — adding up to $42. The major difference, however, is that in spending Bitcoin, you don't physically transfer the bills or coins; you simply sign the spending rights off to another party, updating the state of the Bitcoin ledger with zero items moving peer-to-peer within the eventual settlement. Now, it is important to clarify that when one initiates a new transaction, this string of bits containing the information needed to update the ledger is propagated between nodes, but nowhere within a Bitcoin transaction are “Bitcoins” ever transferred — simply the property rights to future updates on the universal ledger that is the blockchain.

A right to compute

Andy/Getty

Bitcoin is speech. Bitcoin is code. Bitcoin isn't money, despite its ability to operate as a medium of exchange and a store of value, and it certainly isn't money under the jurisdiction of the United States. The compliance-driven statists within the Bitcoin community will tell you we must ask permission from our local governing offices to embrace Bitcoin to pay our taxes in Bitcoin and service our legal debts. But no matter the lobbyist's efforts to incorporate the protocol into the legacy system of litigation and tax, the Bitcoin protocol is technically — in a literal sense — incapable of transferring criminal proceeds between parties. This framework allows us to conclude that Samourai Wallet did not operate “a money laundering service”; it could not even operate a “by-the-books” money-transmitting business using Bitcoin.

They wrote code: code that users across the globe, within a myriad of legal jurisdictions, utilized to exchange certain alphanumeric strings of data over the internet incapable of doing anything other than updating a spreadsheet. The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York claims Samourai has executed over “$2 billion in unlawful transactions” while facilitating “more than $100 million in money laundering transactions.” This accusation contains a complete misunderstanding — not to mention a simply unconstitutional reframing — of what a Bitcoin transaction is and how our elected officials should treat it.

Writing code is not a crime. Even when said code was written with the express purpose of enabling the committing of a crime, the criminal action takes place when actualizing said intention, not at the onset of the authoring or even distribution of the code. Code is speech and should be protected as such. Distributing code is an expression between parties of bytes reduced to bits, eventually to ones and zeroes. Any precedent that establishes anything other than this directly violates the First Amendment and, further, is against the should-be-obvious natural code of freedom of expression.

There are PLENTY of ways that Bitcoin the network can spread itself across the globe and how Bitcoin the asset can monetize to astronomical heights without bringing an ounce more freedom to the populace of the world. Bitcoin's definition has been gaslit by the state to be within the purview of the red, white, and blue regulatory moat, and thus, Bitcoin is in dire need of a redefinition. Bitcoin was never about embracing the state and furthering the reach and influence of the elected officials, who were obsessed with changing the definition of speech, expression, code, and numbers. We have spent the last decade sitting back, watching the bookkeepers take their red felt pens and continually change the meaning of words, slowly bringing the frogs — and their dictionaries — to a boil.

A dangerous precedent

If updating a ledger can be reconstituted as a crime, any expression between humans can be labeled as such.

Bitcoin is a tool of empowerment, and Bitcoin is for enemies. Well, now our enemy, the state, is empowered, and its regulatory goons are barking like wolves at the gate. We must stay clever and arm ourselves with the rhetoric needed for the oncoming onslaught against those who dare to build tools that threaten the spellings of the state.

Writing code is not a crime.

Whispering numbers to a loved one cannot be redefined as a criminal act.

Bitcoin is not money but just a ledger.

A database.

Bitcoin is speech. Jailing those who write code that dares to facilitate the exchange of 1s and 0s to update a ledger is an attack on free speech, on everyone and everything this country supposedly stands for.

If you care about free speech, the time is now to stand up and use whatever remaining public squares we have to fight for the right to speak and express. The precedent made downstream of this case will set many of the state's parameters to snuff out wrong-think on the internet.

You don't have to care about Bitcoin; just know that freedom is being extinguished — not just the two young men incarcerated but the freedom to exchange information.

Free Samourai.

Bitcoin Magazine, the most trusted voice in Bitcoin, stands proudly at the forefront of technology and economics, telling the stories and platforming the people using code to liberate humanity from government money. It will be collaborating with Return on a series of articles about Bitcoin and its essential place in the modern world.