The Bitcoin Religion May Have Found Its Martin Luthers

Last month in Miami, I attended Bitcoin 2023, the world’s largest Bitcoin-themed event organized by Bitcoin Magazine each year. One of the highlights was seeing my favorite nonfiction author, Michael Lewis, interviewed onstage by cryptocurrency entrepreneur, Arthur Hayes. Describing the process of interviewing Bitcoin enthusiasts for his upcoming book about FTX’s disgraced Founder and CEO, Sam Bankman Fried, Lewis said the following:

The feeling I have is that you can say something wrong. When I was [writing] The Blindside, my main characters were evangelical Christians, but they were suspicious of me because they sensed I didn’t share their belief structure…It isn’t that I’m in or out when it comes to Bitcoin, it’s just that I haven’t thought much about it, honestly. I’ve interviewed–I don’t know–200 people, and quite a few of them were like, ‘what are you gonna say about Bitcoin?’…It’s interesting, it’s like a religious thing.

My own observations about bitcoiners occurred thirteen months earlier while at the previous year’s conference and synced with Lewis’ comments. The 2022' conference was the first bitcoin event I’d ever attended, and after the first day while hanging out at the poolside bar at the SLS South Beach hotel, an inebriated buddy walked up and mentioned that he’d just attended a beefsteak dinner with the author of, The Bitcoin Standard. Given the title of this article, it’s worth noting that some bitcoiners refer to this book as “the Bitcoin Bible”.

“What’s a beefsteak dinner?” I asked, before learning that it was “a Bitcoin thing” entailing–among other odd rituals–eating copious amounts of steak (utensils optional). I also learned that my buddy and other “Bitcoin maximalists” are willing to fork over exorbitant sums of money for the honor of attending one of these dinners with the Bitcoin Bible’s author, Saifedean Ammous, who arguably sits atop the food chain of Bitcoin maximalists in terms of influence. Bitcoin maximalists (often shortened to “maxis” by Bitcoin enthusiasts) aren’t a homogenous group, but they tend to share a common view that Bitcoin is the solution to many (if not most) of the world’s problems and tend to subscribe to political doctrines of libertarianism and Austrian economic doctrines.

“Why would anyone want to do that and what does that have to do with Bitcoin?” I asked, poorly concealing how befuddled I was by his words.

Little did I know at the time just how many other odd things maxis share in common which have absolutely nothing to do with Bitcoin, including conspiracy theories of all sorts (again, it’s not a homogenous group by any stretch, so many do not). This was all new and strange to me. On Bitcoin Twitter, maxis are known for personalizing their avatars by digitally replacing their eyes with bright, red “laser eyes” to clearly identify themselves.

Here’s the annoying thing. On the shared-beliefs continuum with bitcoiners, I generally lean their way. I’ve owned Bitcoin since 2017, I subscribe to Austrian economics’ principles of sound money, and I believe Bitcoin to be the soundest money ever created. I’m also skeptical of the mainstream media, have many libertarian leanings, and mine bitcoin powered by solar power (my day job is Chief Operating Officer for a renewable energy company). In short, I’m a Bitcoiner through and through and believe that a hypothetical world based on “the Bitcoin standard” holds the potential to make the world a much more fair and just place.

And yet, the more I immersed myself in Bitcoin culture and Bitcoin Twitter, the more I realized my initial reaction of complete befuddlement to my boozed-up friend was precisely the right one. Even if I did hate Anthony Fauci and Joe Biden (I don’t particularly like or dislike either of them) or didn’t believe humans were mostly responsible for climate change (I do), my passion for learning as much as I can about Bitcoin has zero correlation to those things or to being a carnivore (like most humans, I’m an omnivore and hold no strong feelings about this fact).

One thing to know about Bitcoin Twitter is that the maxis are a disproportionately loud vocal minority. Which is probably why I was so triggered by a picture of a huge steak posted by a laser-eyed maxi in a conversation about bitcoin, prompting me to tweet the following:

“Can someone plz explain how on earth Bitcoin has anything at all to do with being a proud carnivore. Who cares?”

The next day, I read a tweet by Ammous in which he mocked the man who wrote the introduction to the The Bitcoin Standard by calling him “a pathetic fat slob with no self-control” fueling my growing anti-laser-eye sentiment even further. I regrettably waded deeper into Bitcoin’s culture wars by replying directly to Ammous:

“Your books are great but I wish you’d use your platform to elevate and not succumb to social media’s worst aspects–personally attacking people who don’t agree with you…You’re better than this.”

Ammous’ fellow maxis quickly pounced on my tweet, attacking me and coming to the defense of their laser-eyed hero.

“Toxic is the way” (@Lynxabi).

“No we like him toxic,” (@StacknLoad).

“Next you gonna ask him to be a plain Bitcoin Maxi without the “toxic” part?” (@R_Yshua).

You see, in the upside-down world of the laser-eyed, being toxic is a virtue. They say they’re fighting a fiat system that conspires to keep plebs (bitcoiners’ preferred term for ordinary person) powerless at all costs; Being toxic is somehow, in their minds, the way to win over hearts and minds. Granted, I don’t know the first thing about writing computer code or creating an ordinal/inscription (much more on this later) or reading esoteric charts to uncover macroeconomic trends; however, I’ve spent my career as an entrepreneur learning everything I can about what makes people tick (and for what it’s worth, which should not be much, I hold dual masters in sociology and diplomacy and minored in psychology), and embracing toxicity and conspiratorial rhetoric on non-monetary, non sequiturs like vaccinations, sunscreen, seed oils, guns, doomsday scenarios, and climate change is maddeningly counterproductive in terms of spreading bitcoin’s adoption.

Two days later, I tweeted a link to a CoinDesk article I’d just read entitled, “The Bitcoiner Who Stood Up to Toxicity” about Nic Carter, a crypto commentator and venture capitalist who’d recently been canceled by the maxis for tweeting that his VC fund, Castle Island Ventures, was “[e]xcited to be backing @dynamic_xyz!,” a company that was building products, not for Bitcoin but for Ethereum and Solana.

“Extremely disappointing that so many bitcoiners including @saifedean (Ammous’ Twitter handle) disciples are proud toxic maxis. Great strategy if your goal in orange-pilling folks is making them throw up,” I tweeted along with the CoinDesk article.

“Orange-pilling” (a nod to Bitcoin’s orange “B” logo) was a reference to the expression bitcoiners have adopted to describe their efforts to help others better understand and appreciate Bitcoin with the same intensity they do. Think of orange-pilling, in religious terms, as Bitcoin evangelism. If you came over to my house for dinner (and made the mistake of inquiring about Bitcoin), I might orange-pill you by saying something like:

“My friend, to understand the potential for Bitcoin to change the world, you first need a general understanding of the history of money, its evolution, and what makes sound versus unsound money.”

“What’s a good way for me to do that,” you might ask.

Mansplaining further, I’d add, “Well, a great place to start is a book called The Bitcoin Standard. It’s pretty accessible, even if you don’t have a background in finance or economics.

“Awesome! Maybe I’ll go to that local Bitcoin meetup you’re always talking about. Anything else I should know about Bitcoin before going?”

“Oh yes! You’ll probably also want to do a deep dive into how vaccines, sunscreen, seed oils, Anthony Fauci, the World Economic Forum, corporate ESG targets, and woke culture are destroying the world.”

“Wait, what?”

“Oh yeah, and make sure to buy yourself a ‘Free Ross’ t-shirt to show your solidarity with the creator of The Silk Road who’s been unjustly imprisoned for life. If you believe in the idea of Bitcoin as sound money, all this other stuff is equally imperative. The Bitcoin Standard doesn’t discuss any of these things, but the author and his thousands of laser-eyed groupies can’t shut up about them on Twitter.”

“Huh? You’re losing me now.”

“Just trust me. It makes perfect sense if you don’t give it a second thought.”

“But I am giving it a second thought, and all of that sounds ridiculous and scary. I think I’ll just keep using good ol’ American U.S. dollars.”

In the eyes of the laser-eyes, one isn’t sufficiently pro Bitcoin simply by dedicating oneself to promoting the virtues of Bitcoin and building a resume of unimpeachable bonafides as a builder (“builder” being the ultimate compliment amongst bitcoiners) as Nic Carter and his partner Matt Walsh have for far longer than many of the most fervent maxis have been around. Carter and Walsh host my favorite podcast for bitcoin and other crypto-related content (On the Brink), and while they both have made it abundantly clear that they view Bitcoin as the apex cryptocurrency and blockchain, they still don’t pass the laser-eyed litmus test, because they haven’t denounced all others as worthless scams (although they’ve repeatedly acknowledged that a large proportion are).

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It’s unlikely that Bitcoin’s mysterious, pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, knew just how many similarities Bitcoin would one day share with world religions when he first released the code to the public on January 3, 2009. However, the parallels go beyond just the dogmatic in-group mentality of Ammous and other maxis. Maximalists have always taken pride in the fact that while hundreds of proposed changes have been made over the years to change Bitcoin’s code, only a small handful of significant changes have ever been approved. And, indeed, The Ten Commandments are only slightly less likely to be altered than the software code that runs the Bitcoin network. The ossified nature of Bitcoin’s code is a feature, not a bug in their view.

The process outlined by Bitcoin’s core developers to change the code is a notoriously cumbersome one — by design — requiring anyone proposing a change to write up a BIP (short for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) and then trying to convince an overwhelming majority of Bitcoin’s software developers, Bitcoin miners, cryptocurrency exchanges selling Bitcoin, and anyone running a Bitcoin node (the software that keeps track of the entire blockchain ledger from the genesis block to the most recent) to adopt the changes. Maxis like this because they see it as a testament to Bitcoin’s decentralization, something that sets it apart from more centralized blockchains like Ethereum which have a much lower threshold for implementing changes.

And herein lies the irony, and where a couple of self-proclaimed wizards enter the picture.

Casey Rodarmor, Udi Wertheimer, Eric Wall, and someone who goes by the pseudonym Domo (Twitter handle @domodata) could be to Bitcoin what Martin Luther was to the Roman Catholic Church with his protestant reformation in 1517. On October 31 of that year (Bitcoin “Whitepaper Day”, by coincidence), when Luther wrote his 95 theses and nailed them to the door of the Wittenburg Catholic Church in Germany, he upended a number of traditions that had barely changed in nearly 1500 years.

Without getting too far into the technical details, the four individuals above managed to make the Bitcoin network an environment for transacting non-fungible tokens (NFTs), something Ethereum and other blockchains have been doing for years. This has resulted in many laser-eyed maxis blowing a gasket on Twitter, as Greg Foss, a podcaster and Bitcoin Magazine contributor with 128,000+ Twitter followers, did in a Twitter Spaces event days after Wertheimer and Wall dressed up like wizards and danced on the same Miami stage where Michael Lewis was interviewed moments earlier.

Below is a timeline of what these self-proclaimed wizards have done in the past few months to make this possible:

• On January 21, 2023 — with the goal of “making Bitcoin fun again” — Casey Rodarmar released software that enabled inscribing arbitrary, non-financial content, including JPEGs (“inscriptions”), onto Bitcoin’s blockchain. His work was based on something called “ordinals theory” that involves tying said inscriptions to individual Satoshis (the smallest fraction of a Bitcoin. 100,000,000 Satoshis = 1 Bitcoin), in essence creating something non-fungible (ordinals) that was previously fungible (satoshis).
• On February 1, the Luxor mining pool joined forces with Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall to mine the largest ever block ever recorded on the Bitcoin network (block #774,628, approximately 3.96 Megabytes). The block included an inscription of the “Magic Internet Money” artwork from a 2013 Reddit post that many see as the first ever Bitcoin ad
• On February 18, Wertheimer and Wall released a series of 2,121 wizard-themed JPEG inscriptions (a nod to the 21 million Bitcoins that will eventually be mined) into Bitcoin’s blockchain with the goal of “making Bitcoin magical again”.
• On March 8, Domo suggested combining Rodarmar’s ordinals protocol with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as a means of minting and transferring tokens called BRC-20, which has become the standard on the Bitcoin network (for the time being at least)

Changes in the functionality of Bitcoin’s base layer are normally controversial; however, in November of 2021, three Bitcoin Improvement Proposals were combined into one significant upgrade called taproot which were adopted by the Bitcoin community with relative ease. The intention of the taproot + segwit upgrades was to make the Bitcoin protocol more flexible, secure, and efficient. Had the miners, node runners, exchanges, and core developers making up the “governance” of the Bitcoin network known at the time that these upgrades would enable Rodarmor to create ordinals and inscriptions, it’s unlikely the changes would’ve ever been accepted.

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While the story of inscriptions and ordinals is just being written, they’ve already created another internal “culture war” reminiscent of Bitcoin’s “Blocksize Wars” from 2015–17. Instead of “small-blockers” versus “large blockers”, the latest changes have pitted maximalists against NFT creators and enthusiasts. The majority of Bitcoin miners love BRC-20, because it has led to increased transaction fees (miners’ monetary reward, in addition to minting new bitcoin, for their efforts in keeping the Bitcoin network secure through their “proof of work”).

Most maxis, however, are adamantly against it, because they view NFTs as a distraction from what they see as Bitcoin’s core function as a new and improved way of sending, receiving, and storing value. The network was designed as a monetary settlement and transaction platform, they say, not for the tokenization of digital art (scams, according to the laser-eyed) and real-world assets (RWAs).

The tension that had been building on Twitter for months finally came to a head on the Nakamoto (main) Stage in Miami at Bitcoin 23 in what was dubbed ahead-of-time as “The Great Ordinals Debate”. Dressed hilariously as wizards, Wertheimer and Wall displayed their mastery as trolls and hype artists as they debated Matt Corallo (notably, an anti-toxic maximalist) of Block/Spiral and someone who called himself “Shinobi Monkey” while concealing his face with sunglasses, a bandana over his nose and mouth, and a camouflage UASF hat (signaling himself as a “small-blocker” during the Blocksize Wars). It was like some kind of quirky, nerd version of WWE… like Don King had infiltrated The Big Bang Theory. I watched from the audience, marveling at the spectacle of these Bitcoin “heretics” out-trolling the laser-eyes who’d been extolling the virtues of toxicity to the detriment of a thing I’d grown to love–Bitcoin.

I found bitcoiners to be one of the most fascinating groups of people I’d ever come across, and the scene unfolding before my eyes in Miami only reinforced this view. I shared their conviction that the cantillon effect is real and detrimental to human equality and flourishing and that “fixing the money”, as the mantra states, could actually “fix the world”, even if it does take decades.

It’s only natural that when people form a group–whether it’s formed around a religion, sports team, or exercise regimen (have you ever met a CrossFitter who’s not obsessed?) — it doesn’t take long before they develop common rituals. And it’s only natural that those outside the group will find many of them abhorrent in the worst and bizarre in the least. Wearing orange clothes and constantly parroting phrases like “going to the moon”, “not your keys, not your cheese”, “number go up”, and “low time preference” provide positive reinforcement to the collective and are mostly harmless.

However, the laser-eyed maxis annoyed me to no end due to their attempts to entrench into the Bitcoin belief system various litmus tests for entry based on dubious, conspiratorial beliefs that have little or nothing to do with Bitcoin and only serve to divide.

On the twelfth anniversary of Satoshi’s Whitepaper in an article entitled, “Bitcoin at 12”, Nic Carter, the heretic to so many laser-eyed maxis, put it far more eloquently than I ever could how I view Bitcoin and the worldwide movement of enthusiasts and builders supporting it:

People sometimes ask me what Bitcoin means to me, and this is my best attempt at an answer. Bitcoiners who earnestly believe in a better monetary world, and aren’t afraid to bring that reality to bear, are the equivalent of masons and laborers, working on a monetary cathedral which they may never see come to fruition. But this is ok. As long as we believe in a big, audacious vision, believe that there is still beauty in the world, and that there remain great things worth striving for, we will succeed and inspire (Carter’s emphasis).

Today, I can’t imagine anything else I’d rather be working on. I couldn’t be happier to devote my career and energy to the vision laid out by Satoshi twelve years ago…I don’t know if I will see the completion of the project, or even if it will work in the long term. But that doesn’t bother me. I’m focused on placing the next brick.

Blasphemy, right?!!! Wizard #3 (Carter) must also be canceled along with Wizard #1 and Wizard #2 (Wertheimer and Wall, respectively)! Not to mention Arthur Hayes, Wizard # 2104, who interviewed the heathen, Michael Lewis, who dared to point out to us how odd it can be just to talk to us.

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Today, that first block mined by one of Satoshi’s computers is referred to as the “genesis block” and is one of the many days bitcoiners acknowledge to commemorate the heritage of the world’s first cryptocurrency and blockchain. In this case, bitcoiners use January 3 as a day to promote the importance of holding one’s keys in self-custody as opposed to trusting them with a cryptocurrency exchange or other third party (Bitcoin “Self-custody Day”), while other “Bitcoin holidays”, if you will, commemorate the first Bitcoin transaction (Bitcoin “Pizza Day”), the sovereignty of community consensus and the resolution to the “Blocksize Wars” (Bitcoin “Independence Day”), and the day Satoshi publicly released the whitepaper conceptualizing Bitcoin (Bitcoin “Whitepaper Day” and, coincidentally the day Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenburg, as well as Halloween).

Just a few days before I boarded my plane to Miami for Bitcoin 2023, I listened to a Twitter Spaces event in which Wertheimer could barely contain his excitement about a discovery he’d made the night before. While bitcoiners commemorate “Pizza Day” on May 22 to mark the day when Laszlo Hanyecz purchased two large Papa John’s pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin in 2010 (worth about $270 million USD today), Wertheimer had stumbled upon a post from Bitcoin Talk in which a user who went by the name of Sabunir attempted to sell a JPEG on January 24, 2010, nearly 5 months before Laszlo’s pizza purchase. Making it even more interesting is that Satoshi Nakamoto himself provided guidance on how best to complete the transaction to the interested parties.

Aha!! This was proof that Nakamoto himself (as close to a deity as it gets in the “Bitcoin religion”) would have endorsed NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain. The Wizards were now positioned to create their own Bitcoin holiday, “JPEG day” to mark the historic occasion.

And so the battle for the soul of Bitcoin continues…