In response to Colby’s thought-provoking essay on Bitcoin, I’d like to offer some counterpoints to his six reasons to be very leery of Bitcoin. I’m not going to deprecate other investments like real estate, traditional stocks, or tangible assets like gold, silver, and ammo. But I’d argue that throwing Bitcoin and its altcoin brethren out like the baby with the bathwater as a mere fad, Ponzi scheme, or bubble is not a necessary conclusion for pro-white Christians. Here’s why.
First, Colby asserted that Bitcoin’s value is murky at best. What is the value of Bitcoin and its altcoin peers? That depends on which one we’re talking about and what exactly its value proposition is. It’s a bit like asking what the value of a Ford Taurus is, or what the value of a Taco Bell bean burrito is. The former might deliver efficient transportation to the consumer, as well as comfort, safety, ease of use, and aesthetic charm. The latter might offer some nutrition to the consumer, as well as recreation, comfort, convenience, or other such values. Cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin and Ripple are geared towards being a means of exchange. Monero and ZCash, among others, are focused on privacy. Bitcoin itself has become a store of value at present, which was a big reason why Bitcoin Cash forked off from it to refocus on being a means of exchange. There are other tokens and cryptocurrencies that are industry-specific, like PotCoin or Dentacoin, and offer value limited to those industries. But all are essentially different business services offering different values to their consumers/investors. If this hasn’t made the world of normal business go belly-up, why would it negate the world of cryptocurrencies? We can’t just measure business or investments by one value when there are many competing values out there that people desire. The key is whether or not those businesses deliver value that consumers want. If they don’t, they die. If they do, they thrive. Discount grocers and high-end grocers can both exist in the same market because they deliver what their respective customers want. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are out to do the same thing.
With respect to tangible assets like land, food, ammo, or gold, there’s no question that these things are great and good to have. But even their value changes depending on the circumstance. When Lee’s troops were starving at Appomattox Courthouse and the last Confederate train rolled in to deliver much-needed food resupply, it instead showed up with ammo. In that circumstance, ammo was worthless. In others, it would be priceless.
Gold and silver are real money, and Federal Reserve Notes are just printed bits of paper backed by nothing more than the power to print more and tax the American people. However, even gold and silver have their limitations. Gold can be exchanged for bushels of food or land upon which to build a home or plant crops, and silver can be minted in small amounts to serve as means of exchange for cheaper items, like a single meal or a single piece of clothing, in person. However, they lack the transferability of digital currencies. It takes days and weeks to obtain or send precious metals over long distances. Unless you want to limit your commerce to the area you can reach by car, buggy, or foot, digital currencies are necessary. Could they be backed by something real like gold or silver? Ideally. But in the world as it is, Bitcoin is a step up from the U.S. dollar because it is limited in supply whereas the dollar is unlimited in supply. Not all cryptocurrencies have a capped supply like Bitcoin, and these seem more dubious on that account.
As for diverse weights and measures, what God prohibited in the Bible was cheating someone by using fake weights or measures to give the other person in a transaction less than what he really was paying for. If the argument is that a rise or fall in the value of a currency means that it violates this prohibition, I’d counter that by pointing out that even in biblical times gold and silver would rise and fall in value according to its supply and demand. All other currencies also fluctuate in their relative value. God did not outlaw all currency, whether the yen, dollar, or precious metals like gold and silver. Even if a worldwide currency regulatory agency somehow capped the absolute supply of gold and silver, the fluctuating demands of people (think Joseph’s seven years of plenty and then seven years of famine in Egypt) would cause the value of those metals to rise or fall. This is different from a government using the power of the printing press to alter the value of its currency, which seems an obvious way of cheating people out of their money and is in direct contradiction to God’s Word.
Second, Colby said that since Satoshi Nakamoto is an anonymous, possibly fictitious person, then Bitcoin and its ilk are untrustworthy. Unless Satoshi is really Satan spelled backwards in Japanese, it’s more likely that the inventor of Bitcoin is irrelevant to conversations about its reliability or trustworthiness. I’m personally glad that Henry Ford was a great American, but his role in founding the Ford Company has not caused me to buy one of their vehicles. The question is not, “Does Tim Cook go to church?” but “Does an Apple device deliver value?” We can avoid giving our money to companies that oppose us and our beliefs, but to avoid using a technology on account of a mysterious inventor would be on par with avoiding technologies on account of their forgotten inventors. Who invented the automobile brake, anyway?
I’m much more concerned with the whales that own huge amounts of Bitcoin due to their early role in the coin’s life. They can certainly alter the price of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin’s large mining interests can direct its future by consensus. That’s cause for concern because those miners are not accountable to the common people who use and depend on Bitcoin. But on the other hand, we face a worse situation with the Federal Reserve Note, and we still use those. Bitcoin was born partly out of response to this very problem with the dollar. The theory with Bitcoin is that the masses of users can influence and hold accountable what happens with Bitcoin. Power tends to centralize, and Bitcoin’s still young, so whether this happens is a matter of time and public involvement to keep Bitcoin aligned with Satoshi’s vision of a p2p system.
In his third point Colby asked why George Soros isn’t invested in Bitcoin. In his sixth point, Colby asserted that Jews love the concept of Bitcoin. We can’t argue that Bitcoin’s unreliable and untrustworthy because Soros isn’t involved and then simultaneously argue that because his ethnic kinfolk support Bitcoin that it’s also therefore unreliable and untrustworthy. Either their involvement means this ship is going to sink, or their absence means this ship is going to sink — but not both. It is true that globalists will try to use Bitcoin because of its value and because it is borderless. This is a danger of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. They could be used to transition us from national currencies to one or several international currencies.
For what it’s worth, Soros’s peer Warren Buffett has stayed away from tech stocks for decades because his investment philosophy limits him to only those businesses that he can understand inside and out. He says he can’t understand tech, and therefore he hasn’t invested in Apple, Microsoft, and the like. Perhaps fellow senior citizen Soros has the same mindset. Perhaps he’s waiting. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether Bitcoin delivers value to its users day by day. If it doesn’t, it will sink and another cryptocurrency will take its place. That competition is taking place day by day between Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, and many other coins and tokens.
Fourth, cloud mining is dubious, for sure, but mining overall need not be. And why should it matter whether mining coins uses energy? Are we anti-energy consumption environmentalists? If mining a cryptocurrency is productive and helps our people, we should support that. Many in the movement do. The fact that millennials have a desire to get rich quick using ‘this one weird trick’ is an indictment not of the technology, but of the people. The fact that the majority of people in North America are not farmers or manual laborers does not de facto mean that they are bad people, or that what they do to make a living is illegitimate per se. Accountants, teachers, preachers, computer programmers, writers, artists, and more don’t do blue-collar work and yet their work is no less honorable or legitimate in God’s eyes than the manual laborer who sweeps out a factory, rebuilds a car engine, or sows and reaps from a field. We can’t turn the Protestant theology of the nobility of all work into a narrow doctrine fixated on sweat. We shouldn’t adopt a you’re-not-a-real-man-or-a-
As for the allegation in Colby’s fifth point that owning a tiny bit of a Bitcoin is the same as fractional reserve banking, that is simply false. As documented at length in books like The Big Short, what led to the Great Recession was overleveraging bad investments in politically-motivated home mortgages. The fact that Bitcoin and other altcoins can be used in tiny increments has no relation to this. You know what is related to this? Pennies. Buying one one-hundredth of a Bitcoin is like buying a penny. Buying one one-thousandth of a Bitcoin is the same, except that the U.S. government doesn’t make a coin worth one one-thousandth of a dollar. It’s no different, though. The person who has Bitcoin in his wallet is not leveraged. He’s in possession of a private key to that wallet and can use that Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency like he would the dollars in his bank account. The person who has Bitcoin in his digital wallet may not own the Bitcoin technology that mined the coin, but that’s never stopped us from using dollars even though we don’t own the printing presses that produced those dollars. The fact is that you own those dollars in your bank account, and you own that amount of Bitcoin in your wallet.
We are discussing one of the most disruptive technologies of our time. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general might redefine banking worldwide. They can be a source of funds, influence, and anonymous exchange for pro-white Christians. We each ought to investigate whether it is a good use of time and money to invest in cryptocurrencies.
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