My Background

I am a born-again Bible-believing Christian and have had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ since I was 11. I am also a husband, musician, and composer. I hope you get the chance to hear some of my work!

Bitcoin as Religion

I first heard about bitcoin in April 2017 and was immediately captivated and bought my first bitcoin a week later. I was fascinated by the whole issue of trust and how blockchain solves this problem. As a natural libertarian the whole narrative of centralized institutions betraying our trust through corruption, greed, or just incompetence appealed to me greatly and I find the blockchains solution to this compelling- essentially that you can trust in the code.

Reading about and watching videos about Bitcoin, and then reading forums, I started to realize how strong this trust in the blockchain can be. I noticed that Vitalik Buterin describes his religion on Twitter as "crypto" and after seeing this video it confirmed to me that for many bitcoin (or crypto in general) was their God.
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Intriguingly the concept of blockchain does seem to carry many of the same characteristics of the Christian God of the Bible- blockchain is immutable, indestructible, inerrant, trustworthy, fair, it doesn't show favouritism etc. Added to this the promise of future wealth and happiness (if you only HODL!) , and the doubt and scorn given by "non-believers" and you have a fully-fledged quasi-religion, complete with priests (developers), evangelists (Andreas Antonopolous), different denominations (different coins/protocols) and growing mass of disciples.

Bitcoin an Idol?

Is Bitcoin an idol in my life? It definitely has been. I’ve never had a lot of money, so suddenly seeing my small investment grow into a handsome sum, it didn’t take long until I was checking the price compulsively, and massively emotionally invested in it. Added to this religious nature of blockchain (discussed in second section), and it’s fair to say that blockchain has at times usurped God as the thing I’m most excited about in my life.

What does God think?

All this has got me thinking- what does God think about bitcoin? Is he threatened by it? Does he view as an idol the same as Baal or Dagon?
I don’t think so. As with any technology, it is a gift from God. In itself it is something good, but if we make it too big of a thing in our lives, it becomes something negative and harmful to us.
A verse that immediately comes to mind is Matthew 6:24 "You cannot love both God and money".
From this we know that it isn’t money but the love of money that is bad. In it’s essence, sin is where we take God’s gifts and worship them instead of God. This is possible with career, money, relationships, sex, appearance, you name it.

What next?

I wanted to write this blog to connect with other Christians who maybe have a similar experience to mine and to use steemit to glorify God. I think God has given us an amazing gift in blockchain and we should work together in our own small way to make the world a better and fairer place because of it.
But we should remember that before Bitcoin existed, Yahweh is!

Only Jesus can fill the vacuum and need for purpose in our lives. If we try to do it with Bitcoin, we will end up miserable, possibly very rich but still miserable.

So let’s invest with the right attitude without fear or greed and being grateful to God for everything He has given us!