What Does Bitcoin Have to Do With Christianity?


In 2024, nearly 300 people gathered in Nashville for an unusual conference.

They were Christians.

The first day focused on the Bible and economics. The second turned more directly to Bitcoin and the church. The speakers included pastors, theologians, economics professors, Bitcoin developers, entrepreneurs and investors.

The name of the conference was Thank God for Bitcoin.

It sounds like an unlikely combination. Christianity is thousands of years old. Bitcoin began in 2009.

So what brought them together?

The answer leads to a question much older than Bitcoin:

What makes money good?

Can money be honest?

The Bible has plenty to say about money: debt, wealth, greed, stewardship and honest weights and measures.

Some Christian Bitcoin advocates extend those ideas to the monetary system itself.

Central banks can change interest rates and influence the supply of money. That flexibility is an important tool in modern economies.

But Bitcoiners ask a different question:

Should anyone have the power to change the supply of money?

Bitcoin offers a radically different answer.

Its protocol is designed around a maximum supply of roughly:

21 million BTC

There is no central bank of Bitcoin. There is no CEO who can simply announce that another 20 million bitcoin will be issued next year.

Changing Bitcoin's fundamental rules would require participants across the network to accept those changes.

For some Christian Bitcoin advocates, that predictable scarcity connects with ideas about honest money and stewardship.

But an important distinction is necessary.

The Bible does not endorse Bitcoin.

It says nothing about a 21-million supply cap or modern central-bank policy. Connecting Bitcoin's monetary rules with Christian ideas about honesty is an interpretation made by some believers — not a universal Christian position.

And yet this is no longer just an online philosophical debate.

Christian organizations have begun accepting cryptocurrency donations, and the Thank God for Bitcoin movement has built conferences, media and educational programs around the subject.

The connection between faith, money and Bitcoin has become real enough to produce its own small ecosystem.

What are you actually buying when you buy Bitcoin?

This is where the story becomes relevant even if you have no interest in Christianity.

Buy Apple stock and you own a piece of a company.

Apple sells iPhones and services, generates profits and produces cash flow.

Buy an apartment and you own land and a building. It might produce rent.

Buy a bond and someone promises to pay you interest.

Bitcoin is different.

A bitcoin does not generate corporate profits.

It does not collect rent.

Bitcoin itself does not pay interest.

So what exactly is an investor buying?

At its simplest, a long-term Bitcoin investment is partly a bet on this idea:

More people will want to store value in a scarce digital asset in the future than they do today.

That makes Bitcoin's supply important.

But the way that supply works is stranger than the famous 21-million number suggests.

Most Bitcoin already exists. The last part could take more than a century.

Bitcoin's new supply does not arrive at a constant rate.

Roughly every four years, the reward for creating new blocks is cut in half — an event known as the halving.

The result is unusual.

Most of the Bitcoin that will ever exist has already been created.

Yet under Bitcoin's current design, the final fraction is not expected to be issued until around:

2140

Think of a cake.

Almost the entire cake has already been eaten.

But instead of finishing the remaining piece, it keeps getting divided into smaller and smaller pieces, stretching the process across generations.

That creates scarcity.

It also creates a question that rarely appears in simple explanations of Bitcoin.

What happens when there are almost no new bitcoins left to reward miners?

Bitcoin miners are not running computers for free.

Mining requires machines, electricity and infrastructure.

Today, miners can earn money from two main sources:

Newly issued bitcoin

and

transaction fees paid by users.

But the first source keeps shrinking.

As Bitcoin approaches its supply limit, the network will have to depend increasingly on transaction fees to compensate miners for securing it.

That creates one of Bitcoin's long-term economic questions:

Can a network designed around extreme scarcity eventually pay for enough security without relying on significant new coin issuance?

Bitcoin-related SEC filings identify the future economics of miner incentives and transaction fees as a potential long-term risk.

The irony is worth noticing.

The 21-million limit creates one of Bitcoin's most powerful investment narratives.

Eventually, that same limit forces the network to answer a difficult economic question about how security will be funded.

Why do Bitcoiners compare it with gold?

Gold does not generate corporate earnings either.

Yet humans have stored wealth in it for thousands of years.

Gold is scarce, durable and difficult to produce quickly.

Most importantly, people across different countries and generations have continued to recognize it as valuable.

Bitcoin supporters see a digital version of some of those characteristics.

Bitcoin and gold are certainly not identical.

Gold has thousands of years of history. It has jewelry and industrial uses. Central banks hold it as a reserve asset.

Bitcoin is much younger and dramatically more volatile.

But they share one interesting property:

Supply cannot suddenly double just because demand increases.

That is where the enormous Bitcoin investment thesis begins.

If Bitcoin eventually captures a larger share of the world's demand for storing wealth, a limited supply would have to absorb that additional demand.

So perhaps the more useful question isn't:

How high can Bitcoin go?

It is:

How much value will the world eventually want to store in Bitcoin?

That's a very different way to think about the asset.

Scarcity alone, however, is not enough.

Imagine I draw one picture.

I promise never to make another.

There is now only one in the world.

That does not make it worth $1 million.

Someone still has to want it.

Bitcoin faces the same basic rule.

Scarcity needs demand.

Twenty-one million matters only if people continue to believe that owning part of that limited supply is useful.

That makes adoption one of the most important parts of the Bitcoin thesis.

And fortunately, we have already seen one large real-world experiment.

El Salvador tested the theory.

Bitcoin supporters have long argued that the network could help people without easy access to banks and make international transfers cheaper and faster.

In 2021, El Salvador put some of those ideas to the test at a national level by adopting Bitcoin as legal tender alongside the U.S. dollar.

The government launched the Chivo wallet and gave users a $30 Bitcoin incentive.

The goals included financial inclusion and easier remittances.

The results were much less dramatic than the theory.

An IMF review found that Bitcoin usage remained minimal. Surveys cited by the IMF found that only about 20% of firms accepted Bitcoin, while just:

4.9%

of sales were paid in Bitcoin.

Only 1.2% of remittances were transferred using a crypto wallet.

El Salvador does not prove that Bitcoin has failed.

But it demonstrates something investors should remember:

A technology can work without people choosing to use it.

Scarcity is not adoption.

Access is not demand.

And a theoretically useful monetary system does not automatically become part of everyday life.

Now look at the global economy in 2026.

This is where the Bitcoiners' argument becomes especially interesting.

The world is not experiencing a collapse of fiat currencies.

But concerns about government debt, inflation and the long-term value of money have not disappeared.

This week offered a striking example.

After the U.S. Treasury announced larger buybacks of long-term government debt, concerns about fiscal policy and the dollar contributed to a sharp move into alternative assets.

Gold jumped.

Bitcoin jumped too.

Reuters reported that Bitcoin rose nearly 20% during the week, while the dollar weakened amid inflation and debt concerns.

The two assets could hardly be more different.

Gold is ancient.

Bitcoin is less than two decades old.

Yet investors sometimes place them in the same conversation when confidence in currencies, government debt or monetary policy becomes uncomfortable.

That does not prove the Bitcoin thesis.

But it shows why the thesis refuses to disappear.

Bitcoiners have spent years arguing that an asset with a predictable supply could become more attractive when people question the rules surrounding conventional money.

Now markets occasionally give us a chance to watch that argument being tested in real time.

So what is a Bitcoin investor actually betting on?

Not merely a higher price.

A long-term Bitcoin investor is implicitly making several assumptions.

The 21-million limit will remain meaningful.

The network will remain secure.

Enough people will continue to want Bitcoin.

Institutional participation will grow rather than disappear.

Governments will not make ownership and use prohibitively difficult.

And, most importantly:

More of the world's wealth will eventually seek a home in Bitcoin.

If those assumptions prove correct, a scarce asset could potentially absorb much more value than it does today.

If they prove wrong, scarcity alone cannot rescue the investment.

Bitcoin has no corporate earnings underneath it that allow investors to calculate value the same way they might value Apple.

There is no rental income.

There is no promised bond payment.

That makes Bitcoin's potential extraordinary.

It also makes its valuation unusually uncertain.

Before asking where Bitcoin's price is going, ask something else.

Why do I believe 21 million matters?

Why should more people want Bitcoin ten or twenty years from now?

What would make Bitcoin a better store of value than the alternatives?

What evidence would prove my investment thesis wrong?

And perhaps the hardest question:

If Bitcoin fell 50%, would I still understand why I owned it?

Someone who cannot answer those questions may be betting primarily on the next price move.

Someone who can answer them at least understands what the bet is.

Back to Nashville.

Why would hundreds of Christians gather and spend part of a conference talking about Bitcoin?

Not because Bitcoin is Christian money.

The deeper connection is a disagreement about the rules money should follow.

Who should be able to create it?

Who should control its supply?

Is losing purchasing power simply part of a functioning monetary system, or something fundamentally unfair?

Does scarcity make better money?

Christian Bitcoiners have one answer.

Bitcoiners have another version of it.

Central bankers and economists have their own.

Investors ultimately have to decide which parts of those competing visions they believe.

And perhaps that is the most interesting thing about Christianity's unlikely encounter with Bitcoin.

A technology created in 2009 has brought people back to a question humanity has been asking for centuries:

What makes money good?

Bitcoin is not only a bet on a price.

It is also a bet on what people may choose to trust as money.

BEYOND THE OBVIOUS.


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