The Gospel of Bitcoin

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March 19, 2024

A recent tweet published by James Saylor, executive chairman of MicroStrategy, represents him as having laser eyes, his head surrounded by a Bitcoin halo.

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While doubtless Saylor’s portrayal of himself is partly humorous, his laser eyes suggest a person who is gifted with supernatural insight into the truth. The portrait reminds one of Jesus, who is described by St. John’s Revelation as having eyes like a “flame of fire.”

Certainly, Saylor, who was a speaker at the Bitcoin Atlantis conference held this March in Madeira, is a passionate advocate of Bitcoin. The convert from skeptic to “maximalist” and then to prophet now spreads the good news of Bitcoin.

His speech promoted the gospel of Bitcoin in language reminiscent of a Billy Graham crusade. The metaphysics of the cryptocurrency resembled a secularized version of the prosperity gospel preached by some televangelists.

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Saylor relies heavily on the revelations of Bitcoin’s mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, whose golden image can be found in Budapest, Hungary. Nakamoto is also presented as a Christlike figure. Having discerned the inherently evil and thus irredeemable nature of money and existing institutions, Nakamoto found a way to cleanse the earthly temples in thrall to Mammon. Moving currency into the digitalized ether of cyberspace via the Word of algorithms removed the filth from earthly lucre.

As Saylor put it, “Put your money in cyberspace, where it is not subject to weather, war, or supply chains.” Bitcoin removes humanity’s treasures from corrupt and useless “analogue wealth” like real estate, gold, and silver, converting such capital into “digital property conveyed by digital power.”

The new form of money is sheer unpolluted energy, the foundation of a shining city in cyberspace. The entrance to that shining city has a fee: the sacred money of Bitcoin, which is Mammon transformed into a sanctified “forever” currency, having all the characteristics of the treasures described by Christ in heaven, “where moth and rust do not corrupt nor thieves break in and steal.” (Nor doth the tax collector come.)

Saylor’s evangelistic sermon echoed the famous lines from Genesis concerning the created world: in the beginning, there was Bitcoin, and it was good.

Bitcoin is not mere earthly Mammon exchanged for goods and services, but the means of salvation, a token of entrance into a newly created world in which true believers find complete freedom and equality. Bitcoin purges toxicity (once known as “sin”) from a monetary and financial system irredeemably infected with toxic money housed within toxic institutions. It even ends wars by beating the weapons of corrupt capitalism into the plowshares of cryptocurrency residing in inviolable and eternal cyberspace.

Bitcoin divides people, like the gospel example of the sheep and the goats, into two categories: those who understand and accept Bitcoin theology and those who do not. Blessed are they who do understand, for they will inherit the Shining City in Cyberspace, the streets of which are paved not with gold, but with Bitcoin.

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Saylor wound up his Madeira sermon, where he was forced to live outside the gleaming gates of the Shining City by occupying material and temporal quarters for a brief time, with an altar call resembling that of an evangelistic crusade:

This is a spiritual journey and at the final point, you become an advocate. It’s not just you’re all in, you want to go tell other people. You want to convince your company, your church, your government, your friends, your family. You’re an advocate.

In other words, “go ye into all the world and preach the gospel of Bitcoin.”

The ultimate destination for the Bitcoin disciple/investor is a mansion in cyberspace, an eternal building in Bitcoin’s “Shining City.” As Saylor puts it, Bitcoin is not so much a currency as a “billion-dollar building in cyberspace.”

BlackRock’s Larry Fink agrees, stating that one should see Bitcoin as an asset for storage of wealth rather than a currency. Translation: Bitcoin’s cyber-mansions are an alternative to banks for storage of wealth. But meanwhile, we are assured that the push for central bank digitalized currencies will continue.

Saylor presents an enticing religious narrative. But one must wonder how real those forever buildings in the “Shining City” of cyberspace are. One might be a tad suspicious about the prospect of investing in a cyberspace mansion, even one decorated with bored ape art.

Above all, one might be hesitant to invest sovereign currencies in projects that have no attachment whatever to earthly institutions or materiality. Governed as they are by admittedly flawed human beings and as much as they need reform, nonetheless, at least governments, banks, and churches are placed on Earth.

Haven’t we have seen other cities living only in the imaginations of their creators lure investors into emptying their pockets? We have seen modern castles in the sky constructed from Ponzi schemes. We are aware of the old maps drawn up showing the way to the city of El Dorado. We also have seen the futuristic architectural plans for sci-fi cities located on Mars.

Above all, we doubt the wisdom of investing in a “Shining City” whose founders promote anarcho-capitalism, belief in which promotes the complete destruction of all earthly institutions in order to build an imagined utopia in cyberspace, a place where anarchy reigns.

As Timothy C. May wrote as far back in time as 1994:

The Net is an anarchy. … This truism is the core of crypto anarchy. No central control, no ruler, no leader (except by example, reputation), no “laws.” No single nation controls the Net, no administrative body sets policy.

In other words, anarcho-capitalism requires that everyone move away from all existing institutions. It requires migration to a new fantasy home in cyberspace ether, where anonymity reigns, guaranteeing not equality of economic opportunity, but erasure of material existence. Since there is no meaningful attachment to the current world, the only life left would be an existence in which one’s tokenized self lives forever in a tokenized Potemkin cyber-village in the Cloud.

It is a peculiar and dangerous thing to advance economic instruments detached from the material world and its institutions. It is odd to be persuaded to invest and perhaps even live in a pseudo-spiritualized cyber-city in which cyber-monies are created from a mystical formulas of seemingly irreproachable mathematics magically transformed into economic energies. It is amazing to see “work” defined as “mining,” which evaporates much needed and increasingly scarce energy.

In sum, it’s hard not to suspect that the “Shining City” is an illusion and the monies being poured into the “forever” cyber-buildings are simply being siphoned off from sovereign national currencies into global enterprises determined to supplant national entities and their sovereign currencies — especially the dollar.

How ironic that some who are the architects of eternal investments to be placed in a fantasy cyber–“Shining City” also are among those who ridicule the idea of the eternal city of New Jerusalem, believers in which seek to heed Christ’s words to invest in the eternal treasures of Heaven.

Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her the prize for excellence in systematic theology. Her thoughts have been published in many online magazines, including American Thinker. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.