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.
