Discussing the origin and benefits of money can be taboo in the context of theology and religion. Biblical texts vilify money as if owning any more than you need is akin to welcoming Satan himself into your home. In reality, money has historically been so easy to corrupt, that this may not have been that far from the truth. However, the ability to store the value of your labor over the course of your life is not an inherently evil ideal.
By looking at the foundation of good and evil from a theistic perspective, I would argue that money was never intended to be good or evil, but rather a neutral asset for coordinating human effort. Without the concept of money, large-scale human cooperation would need to be backed by love, which can only scale via a deep connection to God, or violence, which easily scales with technology that leverages non-human energy.
Bitcoin offers a restoration of neutral money that is strongly resistant to fundamental corruption and is immune to violence at scale. While it may seem curious that so many bitcoiners have been drawn towards the light of God, I believe this could be due to the removal of evil and corruption from the asset we have chosen to store our value across time.
In the Beginning
In the beginning, there was no money. Human activity was coordinated simply out of the knowledge that coordination would lead to more positive outcomes for the group. People would do work for each other because they knew that others would do work for them in return. We can refer to an idealistic form of this type of primeval society as one that existed in the Garden of Eden.
A perfect society in the Garden of Eden did not require money. Transactions in labor or barter were backstopped by love. Because very few transactions balanced perfectly, and the only available ledger was our own memory, forgiveness was crucial. Transactions backed by love still exist today, but only at very small scale. For example, when children do not repay their parents for raising them from birth, they are not financially penalized or imprisoned; any debt they owe is forgiven. Children are cared for out of love.
Unfortunately, even in these cases, the knowledge that is required to know, for certain, that your actions will optimally benefit an individual, let alone a society, is essentially unattainable. God alone possesses sufficient knowledge of past, present and future to see perfect sets of coordinated human actions through space and time. Thus, love is impossible to scale to an entire population without God.
The perfection of the Garden of Eden was possible only while God was maintained as the highest ideal, the only perfect center of authority. Attempts to create societies with a central human authority, in place of God, have always failed for the same reason we were exiled from the Garden. Genesis shows us just how easily humans can be manipulated by temptation to move away from God.
“’You will not certainly die,’ the serpent said to the woman. ‘For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” — Genesis 3:4–5
All it took was one simple lie for us to question the authority of God and expose the fragility of that society. As long as deceit and distrust are present in the world, the scalability of love to motivate human coordination will be severely limited.
If love is on one side of the coin of non-monetary human motivation, violence is on the opposite side of that coin. As was the case in the Garden of Eden, the forces of evil can destroy human societies with a fraction of the effort it takes to create and maintain them. In addition, violence scales in a way that love never could. Specifically, violence can be scaled by engineering weapons that leverage more powerful forms of non-human energy (gun powder, diesel, fission, fusion, etc.).
Controlling human coordination using violence can often be more subtle than outright slavery. Taxation without the consent of a population is only possible when a government has the military strength to enforce their collection. Anytime a government demands a payment without consent, they are using the threat of violence against their citizens.
What is Money
I believe it was always the intention that money would be the mechanism by which we could walk the line between love and violence, the line between good and evil. Money allowed for the scaling of economic production beyond Dunbar’s number without the destruction of war. In this way, I do not believe that money is the root of all evil; however, if it were not for the presence of evil in all humans, the invention of money would not have been required.
Money needs only to be a simple ledger; a tally of how much value you have provided to society so that others know how much value you deserve in return. It is implied that if you have money, you have added value to humanity and others will work to repay that value. Even more than proof of work, money is supposed to represent a proof of value contributed to humanity in the past.
Value, however, is subjective; not everyone values things equally and these values change over time. However, I believe there is a common thread that runs through all things that have been assigned a monetary value. People are willing to exchange money for those things that other humans have put energy into. That isn’t to say that all human endeavors are valuable, only to say that non-human endeavors are inherently not valuable in the context of money.
Relative scarcity is only one surrogate we use for the amount of human energy that was needed to obtain something. Although air is abundant on the surface of the earth, air is only free when it does not require the energy of other humans to use it. If you require a breathing machine, air filtration unit or oxygen generator to breathe, breathing is no longer free. If you want to breathe in places like the bottom of the ocean, in space or on Mars, air is also not free. This is because other humans were needed to discover, design, manufacture, ship, and deliver the technology that you will need in order to breathe in these locations.
However, value is also not simply tied to the number of human labor hours required to produce something. Things that are valued by humanity have historically been those things that have allowed us to expand our total number of high-quality person-hours on earth. Inventions, tools or discoveries that extend life expectancy, allow for population growth and increase quality of life are the things that humans assign the highest monetary values to.
Price deflation from technological innovation is also generally consistent with the hypothesis that value has a direct tie to human effort. The less human energy required to produce a good or service (e.g., via automation, powered machinery, alternate energy sources), the less monetary value we assign to those things.
Thus, when we use money as a store of value, we are trusting it to carry our past value forward in time until we are ready to exchange it for human energy in the present. From this perspective, stores of value are literally stores of potential human energy. When the degradation of store of value assets is defined as a literal degradation of human energy, it becomes easier to see the evil that is being perpetrated when these stores of value are violated.
The Corruption of Money
There are many ways that stored human energy can be diminished, extracted or stolen from. Because most stores of value are physical in nature, strong physical force has always been needed to protect them. Therefore, we have traditionally trusted entities with the strongest physical security to protect our value. However, in granting that trust, we allow the potential for debasement, taxation, greed, irresponsibility, theft and coercion through violence or the threat of violence to violate our physical store of value assets. Centralized stores of physical value are honey pots for corruption.
Prior to the extensive proliferation of fiat money, governments would violently expand their empires in order to accumulate wealth from nations who were physically weaker but economically stronger. However, governments still needed to physically acquire wealth from their citizens or from the external entities that they conquered. After the invention of nuclear weapons, when the threat of violence and the cost of war started reaching unimaginably enormous magnitudes, governments started more heavily relying on the printing of fiat money, limitless credit creation, and monetary colonialism to continue acquiring and centralizing wealth.
Indeed, throughout all of history, the fundamental problem that we have had with money is its tendency to centralize. Centralization has long been painted as the path of least resistance. A more efficient way of doing business that can trim off those processes that have the most friction and require burdensome and costly dispute resolution.
However, oftentimes it is specifically those areas of friction that reveal deeper underlying complex problems and require additional thinking to solve. Simply choosing between two poor choices and silencing all those in opposition closes the door on the innovation of a more elegant solution. In addition, centralization with humans at the helm puts fragile, easily corruptible human morals in positions where they can benefit themselves at the expense of others. Centralization amplifies the power of corruption.
Centralization of power and control leads very quickly to the centralization of evil. The closer you get to the center of control, the more the temptation there is to abuse that power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
When our governments took off all limits to their ability to print new monetary units, they granted those who are the most susceptible to corruption full access to our most important tool for avoiding violence. When I look through the charts on wtfhappenedin1971.com I don’t see depictions of economic misfortune or poor policy, I see charts of evil taking over our society; I see death and mass poverty of the many and wealth beyond belief for the few.
The motives of evil in our modern world are unchanged; they want to reduce the number of high-quality person-hours on earth and keep as many people as possible off a path towards God. Temptation blares at us from all angles in our modern world. The technologies that we have developed to amplify our own human energy can also be used against us when we are manipulated into using them for evil. Any human action on earth that seeks to prevent new life, shorten or limit human life, reduce quality of life, or prevent people from finding God, should be considered corrupted by the fundamental forces of evil in our world.
The Promise of Bitcoin
First and foremost, bitcoin is money that is extraordinarily resistant to the corruption of evil. The scalable technologies that led to the corruption of physical forms of money and other store of value assets largely do not apply to bitcoin held in self-custody. When properly secured, violence is ineffective at extracting bitcoin without your permission. Unlike prior stores of value, nuclear grade security is available to all users of bitcoin and no trust is required to ensure the security of your wealth.
Although there will still be rich and powerful bitcoiners, they will not have any power to control the wealth others choose to store in bitcoin. Corruption can and will still occur, but because of the decentralized nature of bitcoin, evil will not be able propagate as easily as it can within centralized systems. The more decentralized a society is, the more corruption resistant it becomes because each individual has less to gain from actions that are detrimental to others in the economy.
In addition to offering maximum physical security, bitcoin also offers maximum security against debasement via inflation. Although the block reward does in some ways debase the value of bitcoin in circulation, over 90% of the terminal bitcoin supply has already been issued and future inflation is decaying exponentially. In addition, the new bitcoin issued are used for exactly one thing: to temporarily subsidize miners for their work to process new transactions and secure the history of the ledger.
I believe that if humanity can restore the original intent of money, to walk the line between good and evil and allow an entire economy of humans to decide what is best for society, we will find a dramatic shift in the balance of power between good and evil. With bitcoin you no longer need to trust your wealth to the most powerful and corrupt people on the planet. If evil forces want to acquire your wealth, they are going to have to come and ask you for it.
Michael Saylor recently pointed out that in the traditional financial system you must intentionally direct your inheritance, or it will be stolen by the institutions it was entrusted to during your life. However, when you store your wealth in bitcoin, there is another choice that can be made. You can choose to permanently lock your wealth where it can never be accessed again. In this way, you do not need to choose the winners who receive your wealth and the losers who do not. You can leave it up to all holders of bitcoin to make that choice on your behalf.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” -Matthew 6:19–20
If you choose to store your wealth in physical assets or human systems that have been corrupted by evil, there your heart will be also. When you move your wealth to a store of value that is strongly resistant to evil, your heart will be freed. Above all, when you place the highest value on love and faith in God, your wealth will be protected for eternity.
Conclusion
The struggle between good and evil will go on until the end of time. Although God made humanity to be inherently good, systems built on love are fragile when confronted with temptation. Although communities may be able to function on love and trust alone in theory, in practice, these societies are always corrupted by evil. Money is intended to allow for human cooperation without the need for love or violence and should act as a neutral settlement layer for humanity. But money and other physical stores of value have always tended to centralize and therefore have always been susceptible to corruption.
Bitcoin offers humanity a way to protect wealth from evil and from the primary force that centralizes power in our modern societies, fiat inflation. I believe that because bitcoin is shielded from the evil that is inherent to the fiat financial system, the hearts of bitcoiners have been set free to find God and live in His light.
“Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” -John 3:20–21
Bitcoiners live in the light. Central bankers live in the shadows.
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A note from the author: If you have read this and are interested in how I came to my conclusions about God and bitcoin, I encourage you to read the companion to this article, “An Open Letter to Bitcoiners.”
