As a Christian working in the Bitcoin industry, I regularly field responses from Christians trying to wrap their heads around something that, for many, seems to be much ado about nothing. Thanks to cable news and pop culture, the popular American evaluation of Bitcoin ranges somewhere between “It’s a scam,” and “It’s gambling.”

Many read about criminals using Bitcoin to evade police intervention, or terrorists using it to try to evade sanctions. Some are concerned about how much energy Bitcoin uses, while others question the value of a non-governmental currency that seems to have little present-day utility. Further, Bitcoin’s price volatility has produced thirty percent swings downward in a single day. For skeptics, including Christians seeking to faithfully steward the resources that the Lord has entrusted to them, Bitcoin seems to be a solution in search of a problem.

At the same time, Bitcoin adoption has grown exponentially over the sixteen years of its existence. As of this publication, Bitcoin is the fifth largest asset in the world, behind only gold, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple, and ahead of Google, Amazon, Meta (Facebook), and Tesla. Blackrock and Tesla hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets, and so do the UK and the United States, which are intent on buying more in the near future.

Looking at Bitcoin from a Biblical Perspective

What are Christians to make of this? Why is there such a disagreement about how to value Bitcoin?

I believe we can help explain the disparity by going to an unlikely source. Jesus once addressed a crowd that included a number of Pharisees who objected to him spending time with tax collectors and sinners in the following way: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick…” (Mk. 2:17).

Jesus argued that the reason some were magnetically drawn to him and others reflexively rejected him had to do with how his hearers perceived their own spiritual health. The spiritually poor and needy, who recognized their unrighteousness, were drawn to Jesus, while those who believed themselves spiritually rich and sufficiently righteous either ignored or worked in opposition to him.

They also valued Jesus differently as a result of who they believed him to be and why he had come. Those who saw him as Savior were drawn to him, and those who saw Jesus as a threat to their personal kingdoms resisted his advent.

Without in any way comparing the relative importance of Jesus and Bitcoin, the six years that I have been involved in Bitcoin have led me to see it in a very different light, to the conclusion that it is a timely tool that Christians especially ought to embrace and wield for the glory of God and the good of people everywhere.

What changed?

Understanding the Purpose of Bitcoin

As I initially tried to understand Bitcoin, I was inundated by a flurry of information, and I didn’t have a very good filter to make sense of it. However, I eventually realized that the reason for my frustration was that while I was initially attracted to Bitcoin as an investment, I didn’t understand why Bitcoin actually existed. I didn’t know the problem that Bitcoin was designed to solve.

I valued Bitcoin on my own terms, but hadn’t done the work to understand the value that its creators wanted to add. In hermeneutical terms, I hadn’t considered the authorial intent that motivated them.

The answer to that question was given by Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, in its earliest days on the Bitcoin Talk web forum:

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.

This grabbed my attention immediately.

At that point, I was a church planter living and ministering with my family in Montevideo, Uruguay. When we arrived in 2015, I was shocked to discover that our move coincided with a massive migration of Venezuelan immigrants into neighboring South American countries, including Uruguay.

More than half of the church were Venezuelan immigrants, and as we got to know them and asked the cause of their national exodus, they responded with one voice: hyperinflation.

Venezuela, once one of the wealthiest and most resource-rich nations in South America, had descended into chaos. How did that happen? In short, Venezuelan presidential candidates promised free benefits in order to get elected. Once elected, the new president would simply print new currency units to fund the promised benefits.

This cost-free creation of new currency units decreased the purchasing power of all of the other currency units in circulation, and over the course of a few years, their currency lost all of its value. While this process is common across the world today, it is not morally neutral.

Nicholas Oresme, a fifteenth-century French bishop, objected to similar action taken by Charles V to debase the French currency by secretly adding an increasing percentage of non-precious metals to their money supply to create more currency units and increase his own purchasing power without raising taxes. Economist Jörg Guido Hülsmann, explains in his book, “The Ethics of Money Production,” that Oresme grounded his objection in the eighth commandment, arguing that such secretive monetary expansion was theft, plain and simple.

Bitcoin was created to make it impossible for governments to secure a monopoly on monetary creation. It exposes the lack of justice inherent in modern monetary systems all over the world and disrupts those who benefit from currency manipulation, namely, governments and central banks.

Given that they don’t control its issuance, Bitcoin forces governments and central banks to acknowledge that they are not gods, and are beholden to the same laws that apply to everyone else. Unlike fiat monetary systems, there is no partiality with Bitcoin.

Conclusion

Regardless of its initial outward appearance, Bitcoin is a deliberately crafted monetary revolution. It’s a currency that, like gold, has a real production cost and a limited supply. These characteristics protect our Image-bearing neighbors all around the globe from theft via debasement of their currencies by governments and central banks, the very people charged with protecting their economic livelihoods.

These neighbors, like the sick that Jesus described, are far more aware of the consequences of such policies and the need for innovative solutions like Bitcoin than many Christians in the West. Ignorance of and apathy toward Bitcoin and the problem it was created to solve are luxuries they can’t afford. In our rapidly changing world, I believe that ministry-minded Christians can’t afford them either.