Hello brothers and sisters, welcome to Future Faith, a podcast, newsletter, and publication about living faithfully in an age of democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance. If you’re a visual learner, head over to jaredbrock.substack.com to follow along in print. I’m your host, Jared Brock, and today we’re going to discuss whether or not Christians should invest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
I’m in a good mood today. My freshly pressed apples are happily fermenting themselves into cider, my very pregnant wife is four days past her due-date, and my mother has just landed on the continent after nearly two years without seeing her. So it’s a good day, and I appreciate your prayers in the weeks and eighteen-or-so years ahead.
I’m going to try to get a few episodes out this week, but with baby due at any moment, it’s not so much a promise as a hope.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
Non-wealth-backed, debt-based, government-printed paper money is the greatest scam of all time.
America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, is owned by private banks including Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs; predatory corporations who actually pay some of their bankers to go work for the Fed. Additionally, the major banks sponsor political candidates and lobby them hard once they’re in Congress, leading to a dangerous political situation called regulatory capture. It’s the same in most countries — essentially, rabid foxes now rule our global henhouse.
Because America is bank-captured, the richest people in history get to monopolize legal tender and pillage your wealth whenever they please. And they do. If you haven’t noticed, they’re absolutely out of control right now, having printing 80% of all American M1 money stock in existence in the past 18 months alone:
All this debt-based money printing has created a tidal wave of negative consequences in our lives, and we haven’t even felt the effects of the past two years of crazy printing yet:
They’ve put the world $300 trillion in debt.
They’ve devalued our purchasing power by debasing our legal tender. Not only does this straight-up steal money from everyone holding cash, but it discourages savings — making people less antifragile and more dependent on the state while creating an instant-gratification culture instead of one that plans for tomorrow.
They’ve locked us in an unsustainable debt+interest death spiral that requires all of us to compete against each other, and by pure mathematical necessity, heartbreakingly bankrupts more than 3,000 families per day for thirty years straight.
They use their money power to set the agenda for the whole nation, spending on unending wars, toppling foreign governments, extracting wealth from poorer nations and sacrifice from their own citizens, stealing trillions of hours of human life. In total, this crime against humanity has pillaged several quadrillion dollars in real wealth from active societal contributors.
Let’s not mince words: The corporate-controlled central banking money-printing scam is the biggest sin and crime in human history.
Enter challenger money
Given the utterly corrupt state of modern money, you can see why smart people who actually care about the sustainable long-term wellbeing of humanity started looking for a solution.
One such person was Satoshi Nakamoto.
We don’t know if Satoshi is a man, woman, group, or an AI, and we don’t know if he/she/they/it is even still alive.
Satoshi invented a new form of digital currency that could be sent peer-to-peer, even anonymously. The system can be trusted because all transactions are automatically verified by its decentralized network and recorded in a blockchain, which is essentially a giant decentralized cryptographic spreadsheet.
On January 9th, 2009, Bitcoin was born.
And then greed set in
Our total global wealth is currently valued at around USD$400 trillion.
There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins.
In early 2017, savvy speculators did the math.
If Bitcoin eventually became the global currency, each Bitcoin would be worth twenty million bucks.
That’s when things went crazy.
People started buying and hoarding coins.
As supply constricted, the coin price rose.
More people saw what was happening and jumped on board, bidding coin prices higher and higher and higher.
Other people wanted to get in on the goldrush, and started making their own inferior versions of Bitcoin. Today, there are over 12,000 cryptocurrencies on the market.
Then the pandemic hit and corrupt elites sent the money-printer into overdrive. As house and stock prices ballooned outrageously high, people like Michael Saylor realized they needed to get rid of their rapidly-devaluing $USD, but couldn’t rationally buy wildly overpriced assets either.
So they turned to Bitcoin as a speculative asset, further jacking the price, attracting more speculators in search of a quick buck in hard times. As greed and FOMO set in — and all those government stimulus checks arrived — prices soared even higher.
Today, Bitcoins that cost a few cents worth of electricity are now “worth” around $50,000. The total Bitcoin market cap now hovers around $1 trillion.
So… should Christian invest?
As my newsletter disclaimer makes crystal clear, nothing I write is financial, legal, or tax advice. Blah blah blah, you’re an adult, do what you want to do.
But I don’t think anyone should invest in Bitcoin for four major reasons:
First:
It has no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it, wear it, or heat your house with it.
It is not a productive asset. It isn’t a factory that produces an item. It’s not a field that produces a crop. It’s not a firm that offers a service.
It has zero underlying value. It’s not backed by land or commodities or any other form of real useable wealth.
Bitcoin is just a bunch of computer files. It’s just a distributed ledger, a fancy Excel spreadsheet.
Its value is derived solely from the trust that people place in it — namely, that the price will continue to rise indefinitely and that there will always be new investors to buy out the old ones. On that standard of belief, the evidence is crystal clear (and don’t trust any online bitboy who tells you otherwise):
Bitcoin is currently being treated like a Ponzi scheme.
So if your motivation for buying Bitcoin is to buy and hoard it until the price goes up, this is deeply unethical, because someone will eventually get hurt. Currency is meant to be spent, given, or invested in producing real wealth for the world. Not hoarded.
Second: God calls Christians to be good stewards of our money, and speculating in Bitcoin is a massive risk right now. Just remember what you’re actually doing when you decide to “invest” in crypto: You’re betting against the established powers. A bet on crypto is a bet against centralized violence-backed money. It’s a noble act, but an extremely risky investment strategy.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that many governments will make crypto illegal once they introduce their own totalitarian surveillance coins. (See last week’s Panopticoin episode for more.)
Third: Christians are called to work with their hands and enjoy the fruits of their labor, not passively skim profits off the backs of others without contributing anything of real value to the world. For the same reason that gambling on the stock market isn’t moral, Christians hold themselves to a higher standard when it comes to stewarding God’s money.
I have a friend who owns 36 full Bitcoins. He fully expects them to be worth $10 million apiece within a decade or two. But has he contributed $360 million in value to the world? Not at all. All he did was buy a few thousand dollars worth of digital files and waited for other people’s greed and fear to pad his bank account. Is this a God-honoring way for a Christian to amass wealth?
Four: When (not if) the next recession comes — when house prices plummet, the stock market crashes, and millions lose their jobs — people will need to pull money out of assets in order to fund fiat liabilities like mortgage payments and daily expenses. What’s the most liquid asset most people have? Crypto. When millions of crypto holders desperately need fiat cash to stay afloat, expect them to reluctantly pull tens of billions from the exchanges and sink prices, if not crash questionable coins like Tether and house-of-cards operations like the DeFi and NFT markets. Wouldn’t it just be better to be generous to the poor instead of gambling in an online casino?
All told, it seems to me that investing in Bitcoin is an extremely unwise and likely unethical thing to do.
That said, it doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
After much research and deep introspection, I have come to the conclusion that if the only two realistic options are an unfortunately hyper-individualist libertarian currency called Bitcoin versus the dystopian nightmare that is totalitarian surveillance currency, the inevitable decision for rational people is to side with the former. Humanity stands a better chance of achieving widest-spread well-being when we the people create our own money.
So… what should we do with crypto?
Satoshi Nakamoto made a huge mistake when launching Bitcoin.
He mined about one million coins — which would sell for about $50 billion today — but he never used them. Just like the bitboy Ponzi speculators in the current market who dream of the day when Bitcoin is the world currency and they all get rich for doing nothing, Satoshi hoarded his coins instead. He just sat on them back in 2009, and all these years later, they’re still just sitting there to this very day.
So what should we do with cryptocurrency?
I think we should do the same thing we do with every other currency:
1. We should spend it.
We need to spend crypto like crazy. Every day we treat it like a Ponzi scheme brings the whole thing nearer to the end, as corrupt governments rapidly build their own Orwellian competitor coins.
We need widespread global crypto adoption as fast as possible; where every man, woman, and child on earth is spending crypto daily, and businesses are transacting in hundreds of trust-based coins, ridding the economy of trillions in toxic debt-based money.
Crypto needs to be so widespread that governments should be absolutely terrified to take it away from us. That’s why we need to make crypto cheap and plentiful, spreading those satoshis as far and wide as digitally possible.
2. We should create our own cryptocurrencies
I cannot believe that there aren’t any Christian cryptocurrencies out there yet!
We are the largest and most networked family on the planet, and we don’t have our own micro-economies up and running? It’s insane.
We have the opportunity to create sound money that can be a blessing to the planet and the poor, but when was the last time your church or denomination talked about investing in world-changing projects like this?
We could create coins that are stable, free from thieving inflation, backed by real value, that are fair and trust-based instead of violence-backed, that can serve as a secure means of payment even when governments try to exclude Christians from the global economy.
On a personal note, if you know any Christian technologists or investors, please send them this episode and get them to contact me via jaredbrock.com, as there’s a group of us who would love to get a God-honoring coin off the ground.
3. We should give it away.
Imagine, if instead of hoarding his coins, Satoshi had sent the following text to millions of people:
Hey,
Here’s a free Bitcoin.
Spend it.
Smooches,
Satoshi.
You would’ve heard about crypto ten years ago if millions of people had immediately started using it in 2009.
We would’ve had a ten-year jump on corrupt governments to reach global crypto adoption.
Just look at El Salvador. When they made Bitcoin legal tender, they gave everyone $30 in free Bitcoin to get started, and 25% of the population jumped on board in the first two weeks.
(On the sinister flipside, China is doing the exact same thing to induce people into using its horrific social credit system-linked surveillance currency.)
Imagine if we, as Christians, were radically generous with our coins. If the poor widow can give the very last of her wealth, just two copper pennies, then surely we can give a little more of our wealth today.
We need to be generous with our money, be it dollars, pounds, euros, pesos, or Bitcoin. And our time, our possession, and our homes.
As for Bitcoin, the Bible tells us to honor God with our wealth. That’s why I encourage all my listeners not to invest in any currency. Currency is supposed to be a means of payment. Currency isn’t supposed to be an investment. It’s meant to be spent, invested, and given. When it comes to cryptocurrency, we need to do that now, before money is out of our control forever.
Luckily, our ultimate treasure is one that can never be vanquished. Governments can’t inflate it, thieves can’t steal, moths can’t eat it. My friend Andrew likes to say that his life’s work is to convert temporary money into eternal worth. That’s our ultimate call as Christians, no matter what currency we choose.
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