My fellow bitcoiners. Like many of you, my quest for truth began with the bitcoin rabbit hole. However, as I continued deeper, my bitcoin path began revealing rabbit holes to other truths, some of which I ended up exploring. Some of these passageways led me to God; a most peculiar place for me to find myself when initially investigating the properties of inviolable absolute scarcity.
This letter is not intended to guide you down the same paths that I traversed or to retrace all of my steps back to the beginning of my initial investigation. However, I would like to offer some of the questions, research and conclusions I had along the way, in the hope that you too may take the time to investigate a path that leads you to the true highest ideal.
Although I was raised Catholic, and even in my early adult life regularly attended church and believed in God, by the time I reached my late 20s, I had drifted away from that life entirely. For me, a big part of the reason why I started to distance myself from God was simply because I didn’t understand. When it came to religion, I was lost. I did not have any idea what the purpose of any of our lives was really supposed to be about. I had the church’s concepts of heaven and hell, but none of it ever really seemed real to me. Beyond lacking a mental framework for the physical existence of a place that you go after you die, I also didn’t understand how my actions here might lead me to the good place or the bad.
As many of you have experienced in your own lives, as I fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole, I found my time preference lowering. As it did, I found myself asking a question common among bitcoiners, “what is the highest ideal to strive for?” As I started thinking more deeply about what things I valued most, why I valued them, and what things I should be doing to gain long term happiness and contentment, I couldn’t help but reconsider my younger notions of God. Eventually, I began to wonder if my time preference was actually low enough if I couldn’t conceive of a life after death. So, I began digging.
First, I felt compelled to revisit the stories of the bible that I heard in my youth. Simply due to the volume of text, I started with the much more manageable New Testament. Like many other Christian bitcoiners, I was excited when I found so many things that aligned with the bitcoin culture. The overturning of the money changers’ tables, the toxicity against authoritarian establishments, truth living in the light and evil hiding in the dark, etc. However, none of this really made anything more real or tangible to me from that other world.
For a while I thought perhaps heaven and hell were simply your final living thought. If you felt contentment with your life as you expired, perhaps this would be heaven, feelings of regret or shame, perhaps hell. Later, I spent time speculating on possible connections between entropy, metabolism, life, and time. This path led me to believe that time perception may be related to metabolic rate. I theorized that perhaps as your life is ending and your metabolism decays to zero, your perception of time would inversely extend to infinity, trapping you in a timeless eternity. But I was still unsatisfied with these conclusions.
Oddly enough, the moment when things started feeling real for me was when I read a lengthy twitter thread that someone retweeted and happened to appear in my timeline. In the thread, connections were made between a lot of seemingly unrelated areas that pointed, not directly to the existence of God, but towards the real existence of beings from another realm. In the thread, alien encounters, psychedelics and folklore are used as extra biblical examples of when beings from another realm had been exposed.
I once had someone explain belief in heaven and hell as something we must trust to be true because it simply could not be verified. That is, you can’t die, observe the existence of heaven or hell, and then return to your normal life. But some years back I watched a fictional TV show, “The OA,” about a scientist who was studying Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and I liked some of the possibilities they explored. Subsequently, I had flagged the book “After,” by Dr. Bruce Greyson in my Goodreads profile, but had never gotten around to reading it. So that became my next step.
In the book, Dr. Greyson details his scientific approach to collecting data and drawing conclusions about NDEs and he shares a number of stories from his patients. Hard science is included alongside personal experience in a way that makes a compelling case for continued cognition and experience after death. After reading this book I felt like I could start finally putting together a mental framework that connected some of the information I was gathering.
However, I did not stop there. I read about simulation theory and concluded that it too is consistent with the theological framing of the universe when you realize that God is the designer of our simulation. I learned about connections between Christianity and the Vedic traditions from Wolfgang Smith. I went down a rabbit hole on evolution and intelligent design and how academia suppresses any and all of the overwhelming evidence against purely Darwinistic evolution. I also found the amazing show The Chosen, that gave me so much more relatable context to the Gospels.
As I started taking the words of the New Testament more literally, I started to question when it was written and by who, what went into its many translations and if there were other sources of evidence that corroborate Jesus’ life. The book, “Evidence that Demands a Verdict,” investigates these types of questions and presents the cases for and against the accuracy and literal truth of the bible. Here, I was surprised to find an overwhelming amount of historical and first-principal evidence for the literal accuracy of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
So, what is my conclusion? I believe, and my conviction in this belief has only been strengthened the more I have learned, that our life on this earth is not the end. I believe that this universe was created for us by God, and the purpose of our lives is to become devoted to Jesus Christ so that we can be reborn, after death, into the kingdom of heaven.
Returning to my original question, “what is the highest ideal to strive for?” I now believe that the life of Jesus Christ is the highest ideal for us to strive for. Jesus’s life on earth represented the ultimate sacrifice for our forgiveness and truly accepting Him into your life, will allow you to experience the fullness of God’s love.
Although many may think that this sounds crazy, I propose that it sounds no crazier than asking a pre-coiner to sell all of their chairs so that they can stack more bitcoin… and never sell it. That is to say, if you haven’t taken the time to investigate Christianity, it does not surprise me at all that you would be skeptical. In much the same way that bitcoin is attacked by centralized authorities, theistic belief systems have also been targeted and removed from governments, media and academia. Is it really surprising that the same governments and academics who insist that inflation is necessary for an economy to function also insist on a naturalistic, scientistic belief system that places them as our highest authorities?
It is also commonly accepted that humans are truly different from the other lifeforms on this planet. Regardless of if you call it consciousness, intelligence, abstract cognitive ability, a soul, or the spirit of God, it’s hard to deny that we do things differently than all other species. Beyond survival, we feel compelled to seek knowledge, quest for truth, expand our horizons and explore new regions. It’s like we know something is missing, and if we could just find another piece of the puzzle, we may finally be at peace.
Is it so crazy that we could have a spirit or soul in us that was simply designed to seek its creator? Are we not searching the universe for other superior, all-knowing lifeforms? Do we not all crave to know the truth about the creation of our universe and the origin of life on earth? Do we idolize fictional superheroes who have the power to bend reality to their will?
Just because you cannot see or touch God, is that really evidence against his exitance? I find it interesting that many bitcoiners who reject the existence of God due to his lack of physicality in the universe also actively criticize those who disregard bitcoin for the same reason. Non-physicality is a feature, not a bug.
Before I close, I would also like to clarify that this letter is not an endorsement of any Christian religion, per se. Also many rituals, ceremonies, blessings, scripted prayers and religious holidays are manmade and are not necessarily required in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. All you need to do is believe in, and devote yourself to, Jesus Christ.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” -John 3:16.
It is often said that bitcoiners are the remnant. I find this to be quite an appropriate title given the context of this letter. We are truth seekers and have learned to spot when long held beliefs are systematically targeted and removed from a society when they threaten those in power. I encourage you all to explore your own spiritual rabbit hole in search of the true highest ideal to strive for. And when you do, I implore you to include your own investigation of Jesus Christ.
Bitcoin saves your time on earth; Jesus saves your time forever.
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A note from the author: If you have read this and are interested how bitcoin aligns with the Christian theology of good and evil, I encourage you to read the companion to this article, “A Theistic Perspective on Money and Bitcoin.”
