Theology in the Raw - Thank God for Bitcoin: Jordan Bush

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Jordan Bush is the author of Thank God For Bitcoin and the founder and executive director of TGFB Media, which exists to help Christians understand and use Bitcoin for the glory of God and the good of people everywhere. Prior to founding TGFB, Jordan and his family served as missionaries and churchplanters in Montevideo, Uruguay. Register for the Exiles 2 day conference in Denver (Oct 4-5) here: https://theologyintheraw.com/exiles-denver/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of theology in the raw. The two day exiles and Babylon conference in Denver, Colorado is just a few days away, October 4th and fifth. All the information is at theology and rod.com. We're talking about discipleship in an election year. We're talking about sexuality after purity culture. We're talking about fake news, propaganda, and healthy news consumption. It's going to be a barn burning. Not going to want to miss it. You can attend live or virtually again, theology, rod.com. My guest today is Jordan Bush, who is the author of thank God for Bitcoin and the founder and executive director of a TG FB media. Thank God for Bitcoin media, which exists to help Christians understand and use Bitcoin Bitcoin

for the glory of God and the good of people everywhere. Prior to founding TGFB, Jordan's family served as missionaries and church planners in Montevideo, Uruguay. This was a really fascinating conversation. As I said at the very beginning, my learning curve went through the roof because I know hardly anything about Bitcoin and I know many of you probably don't know much about Bitcoin either. So this was a really fascinating discussion. I learned a lot and I think you will too. Please welcome to the

show for the first time, the one and only Jordan Bush. All right. Welcome Jordan to theology and the raw. I am really excited about this conversation primarily because my learning curve is going to go through the roof because I know hardly anything about Bitcoin. So let's start there, Jordan. What is Bitcoin and keep it as ground levels you can go and how did you get into it? Cause I think maybe those stories might intertwine. Yeah. So, so Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency. It was an open source software project that was the culmination of several decades of work in the

field of cryptography. This was something that cryptography has been used throughout generations, hundreds of years, especially specifically in war, to try to hide information and ensure that information gets delivered to the intended audience. And so for over the last 100 years or so, or I guess 70, 75 years, something along those lines, since the end of World War II, there were people who were trying to leverage this cryptography for other more civilian level ends, including over the last few decades in the 80s and in early 90s, they were trying to figure out how can we apply this technology to money

and have a basically create a monetary system that could be used to enable individuals to transact freely, especially once the, again, in the 80s, once computers came around, they tried to figure out how can we transact on the internet in a in a secure private way. And so Bitcoin was it's really this technological innovation. It's this, you know, philosophical innovation and achievement. And

I believe someday it's going to win the Nobel Prize just because the number of different, you know, things that come Prize, just because the number of different things that come together in Bitcoin, the number of different fields, and then technological achievement that all kind of coincide with Bitcoin, it's just a really fascinating story. So that's the Cliff Notes version of what it is.

Again, we'll go into some- Real quick, can you define cryptography? I know the Greek word, so I could probably figure it out, but for our audience, what is that? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, it's just like hidden messages. It's basically, if you break it down, crypto is, I believe it's to hide. I think so. Yeah. And then graph is writing. So it's like hidden writing. You can think about the code talkers.

This is the common example of during World War II, they used these Navajo Indians, this language that really wasn't very well known by anybody else. They used that to obscure military messaging in order to try to protect war interests. They used this. Okay. Again, there's different ways to do this. There's different approaches and that have different levels of difficulty to crack. And so, cryptography, modern cryptography is used, it basically uses very complex numbers

and the probability of discovering these very large numbers to, basically, and there's the ciphers involved, they basically try to hide messaging. And so, this is. This is used for everything from your bank uses cryptography in order to obscure people's access to their accounts so that normal people just can't get in. Some hacker couldn't get in there and see other people's accounts or access people's accounts. It's also used for something like protecting the nuclear codes. You know, we are, we are very heavily reliant on, on cryptography for, for security at an, at a national level, uh, at a, at a business level, international

business level, and then, and so then obviously as well, uh, individuals, you know, have those tools available and more and more tools as things get worse and worse on a, on a privacy front and, uh, just trying to protect your, your data front, uh, cryptography. There's more and more people who are interested in and invested, willing to invest time and resources into creating tools that leverage cryptography, uh, for the good of, of good people everywhere. Okay.

Awesome. I'm sure if people are still a little bit like, okay, I'm still trying to get around, I'm sure some of the gaps will be filled in, but yeah. So how did you get into Bitcoin? Yeah. So my road to Bitcoin was not your typical one. I grew up in a Christian family. I would say if anything, we were like rhinos, or like Neo-Cons. We were voted for, my parents voted for George Bush and very much Republican and those kinds of things. And so I grew up, you know, I cheered when the Iraq war started. I remember just saying,

I look back with shame and saying like awful things about how we should go over there and kill people. You know, I'm a Christian, like we're, but just like this is the kind of the, the ethos. I did the same thing to me. It was like an outflow by Christianity to celebrate killing as many people in Iraq as we could. That was like, of course I would want that because I'm a Christian. Exactly. Of course Iraq and the people had nothing to do with 9-11. Of course we're going there and all kinds of stuff. So that was kind of where I

started politically and then get through near the end of my college years. I had started listening to Glenn Beck and I was like, wait, this more libertarian, these guys, they make some good points. And then heard about Ron Paul and again, he had a really profound impact on me, the limited effect. And so again, I was at a Bible college. I was wanting to be a pastor and missionary. So I was not spending lots of time studying economics.

And so then I bought some gold and silver in 2012. That was actually my first touch with Bitcoin. I was at a gold and silver broker and this girl who was sitting behind the desk had a Bitcoin sticker on her computer. I believe Bitcoin was trading at around $200 at that point and I just asked a question about it and was like, that's pretty interesting, right?

And the guy just said, yeah, it really is. And I just was not ready at all. So it wasn't until, you know, flash forward a few years later, 2015, my wife and I went to be church planters. We joined a church planting team, reform Baptist church planting team in Montevideo, Uruguay. And so for the next four years, we helped plant this small church and anticipated Uruguay is a very secular country about 50% of the of the country would claim to be Catholic, Roman

Catholic, but only about 5% actually practice. Only 50% would claim. Yeah, yeah so again it's still like nominally in but even even relative the rest of Latin America that's still a very small amount. Yeah. Catholicism has a pretty big stronghold in Latin America. But then the other 50%, out of the other 50% of the country, 40 of them would claim, and this is a few, these numbers are a few years old, so it's probably even higher now, but 40% would claim to be either atheist or agnostic. And so, my wife and I, we had read a bunch of Tim Keller and benefited from him. We were both philosophy majors in college. My wife was doing papers on Derrida and Foucault

and all this kind of stuff. And so when we were moving to Uruguay, we were anticipating going to be very winsome and going to be Tim Keller of Uruguay and it was gonna be great. And then we get there and find that within a few months, half of our church members are Venezuelan immigrants. And so these are people who, very different culture,

very different, you know, just religious upbringing. And so my initial question was, as we're trying to minister to these people's needs, they're arriving, there's about 60,000 over the course of a few years arrived in Uruguay alone. And so I just started trying to figure out, you know, well, why are these people here? You know, what's going on in their country? And in a nutshell, basically what I found is the government had hyperinflated their currencies, their currency. Again, there's a bunch of different ways in which this went down, but part of it was in order to get elected, and this pretty happens all over democracies, republics, democracies, is we have elections every four years, every six years, and to get elected,

one of the most tried and true ways to get people to vote for you is to promise them free stuff. So in order to fund that stuff, in order to complete those promises in the world we live in now that is fully, every country on earth has fiat currencies, we're called fiat currencies, where the currency isn't backed by something of value, it has value because the government declares that it has value. And so basically, in places where that happens, the way that governments fund these promises that they make to people is largely just to print money. They do it through a number of different ways.

They can issue new debt and say, all right, we'll give you the benefit now and then we'll pay off the debt in 10 or 20 years into the future, but that's largely how this happened. And so over time, the money in Venezuela, the Bolivar like became completely worthless to the point that people were literally taking out and throwing it into dumpsters or turning it into art projects and making things out of it

because the money itself had lost so much value. So I'm sitting there just trying to make heads or tails of this and again, just do normal Christian ministry. But in the back of my mind, I'm sitting there thinking about these things and I'm seeing the consequence that this, something is seemingly unspiritual in my mind at that point as monetary policy.

I'm seeing the very real impact that it has on, for example, families. Most of the men who were, or most of the people who were arriving in Uruguay at that time were men. And they were, again, this can influence a conversation we can have later about just the effect of this on immigration.

But these were quote unquote military age males who were moving by themselves to Uruguay. And then they were leaving their wives and kids in Venezuela. The goal was to get a job and to make money and send money home to them and then eventually save up enough money to be able to bring their families to them. When they're first doing this, they're hoping that process is going to take six months or something or maybe a year.

It ends up taking, we saw this repeatedly happen three or four years that this process would take. We just saw how this destroyed families. There were a number of families that we knew personally who, the husband and wife there ended up being in fidelity and divorce and kids growing up without their fathers. We just saw the practical impacts of this. But then we also started, as we're in Uruguay, Uruguay has one of the most stable economies in Latin America. But one of the things that I found over time was that,

okay, Uruguay is just at a different point in the cycle. Uruguay is at a more stable point today, but every currency in Latin America has failed three or four times since 1971 when the US went off the gold standard. And so basically I saw this happening. So even though Uruguay was in a better place than Venezuela at that particular moment, things were still getting bad there and had been very bad there in the same way that had been bad

in Venezuela. And so I just started to think about this and I'm just like, well, like what do you actually do about this? You know, is this just something you're, you're doomed to, you know, to deal with? And, and so I just didn't really have good answers. I didn't really have anything that I thought, again, in the limited time that as I'm pastoring, that I'm thinking about these things, I still just was like, well, what do you really do about this?

And so it wasn't until 2019 when I got into Bitcoin, I had bought like a couple hundred dollars worth. And then in 2019, I really, as a missionary, you have something called a 403B account. That's like the nonprofit equivalent of a 401K. And so we'd been missionaries for five years. And in that time, I had never even looked at our retirement account.

Again, to give you an idea of who I was, and kind of, I just had never even looked at it. Cause I'm like, I don't know anything, so I'll just leave it. And so after five years, I'm just like, I have kids now, I've got a wife, I should probably look at this, and so I took some time to just try to study investing, and I'm like, what do I invest in?

And so the one thing that I knew about investing was you're supposed to buy low and sell high. I'm like, okay, well that's intuitive, that makes sense. But then as I'm doing, you know, cursory research, I'm like, okay, well, housing, you know, the housing market, real estate is at all time highs ever. The stock market is at all time highs ever. You know, gold is pretty much at all time highs ever.

I'm just sitting there looking at this, I'm like, well, what are you supposed to invest in when everything's at all time highs? You know, nothing is low for me to buy. And so then as part of this process, I just was like, all right, well, here's this thing Bitcoin. Like it was doing crazy things, gyrations in 2019. And so I just said, all right, well, what is this thing?

You know, I'm a philosophy major. I pride myself on being at least a somewhat thoughtful person. So I'm like, I have no categories to even know what this thing is or to know how to think about it, whether positively or negatively. Um, and so over the course of about a year, I just went on this, like, you know, deep dive of like, it really like goes into Austrian economics and then it goes into history and philosophy and all these things.

And it just, I just, through this time, I just found myself just really amazed at, you know, the, you know, amazed by what Bitcoin was and then just the, the goal with which Bitcoin was created to, you know, the, the problem that Bitcoin was created to solve. And so, yeah, just the more that I, the more that I, you know, got into it and I just found it more and more interesting and started to see the parallels and the points of intersection between what my Venezuelan and Uruguayan brothers had and were experiencing and the thing that Bitcoin has created to solve. At the end of the day, what I came to realize was that Bitcoin, which was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the creator specifically talks about the fact that,

he objected to the fact that in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, all of these banking entities were just bailed out. They had been profligately gambling, just awful things, and yet none of them experienced the consequences. It was only largely the normal people who lost their homes, who lost their jobs, who lost all these things. And so the fact that a government could create money

out of thin air to bail out bankers and other entities who again were in the wrong and the people who would bear the burden of that decision would be normal people. He's like, this is just an unjust thing. And so I want, he wanted to create a currency that a government couldn't hyperinflate. Government couldn't create more units of, uh, if it, if it seemed well to them. Real quick, is that what you just said there, would that be the kind of, if you can reduce it to a sound bite, is that one of the fundamental aspects of Bitcoin?

That this is a monetary system that is uncontrolled by the government? Correct. It's a monetary system that a government does not make the final decisions about and can't do that just due to the way that it's constructed and the way that it's built. All right. You got me hooked already. Keep going. Okay. So yeah, so I mean, this is kind of where, again, as I'm going through this,

I'm also pastoring the church. I went from being this very content number two, leading music and doing one-on-one discipleship with largely young men. We had, one of our teammates had a family crisis, and so he was the guy who was pastoring at that point. And so they had to go back to the States for a number of months at least.

And so we had a decision to make, which was, are we gonna stay here and continue ministering and I'll kind of take his place, or are we gonna move back to the States and just do something else? And so again, my language abilities at that point were fine. I could speak Spanish, but pretty much overnight I go to preaching every Sunday.

And so that was this really, again, it was a very, I loved the process. The Lord is very kind. And even in spite of the fact that the situation was more difficult for native Spanish speakers to tolerate this gringo who doesn't speak anywhere near as well as they do, the Lord is very kind and they had a lot more patience for me than me and my wife anticipated they would. And so for the next two years, I solo-pastored the church. So as I'm going down the Bitcoin rabbit

hole on the side, as I'm doing sermon prep and pastoring this church. And so the thing when I started to see over the course of this year that I was getting into Bitcoin was, man, there's a whole lot more moral considerations to this issue of monetary creation than I would have ever imagined. And so the thing that I came to realize, I basically, I read this book in 2020.

I got joined this book club as a group of Christians who were also into Bitcoin, Who wanted to read these books? And so the first book was by a a theonomist of all things named Gary North who wrote this book called honest money It's a primer to this topic. It's written at like a ninth grade reading level. It's a fantastic book But it was just hilarious to me because all the other guys who I was in this group with were the farthest thing you could possibly imagine from Theonomist. Again, I'm the closest, but still was nowhere near Theonomist. So we read this book and it just basically goes through, I'll give one example, Gary North talks about how there's moral dimensions. Christians have

done great work to articulate that there's moral import to what you do with money. So like if I'm using my money and I'm going to, you know, I'm going to visit prostitutes or I'm doing something like there's a moral component to how I use my money. Money is revelatory to what I love, um, to what I want and desire and all these kinds of things. So there's moral, there's moral import to what we do with money. Um, and so that I had a good grasp on. But what Gary North talked about is that

monetary creation actually has moral import as well. And so this, as I'm reading this book and as I'm thinking through this, I was like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And then basically I guess the way that this came to a head in terms of like scripture, as I was doing sermon prep, I was in the book of Galatians and in the book of Galatians, the apostle Paul at near the end of the book, he starts talking. He says, God is not mocked for what a man sows that will he also reap. And so I'm like, okay. So I'm sitting here, I've got largely new believers in our church. And so I'm like, all right, how do I, how do I articulate this in a way that makes sense, you know, to them? And so I was like, okay. So the apostle Paul was making the claim that God has so hardwired

this principle of sowing and reaping into the fabric of the universe that to deny it is to mock him. And so I started thinking about, okay, so what are some examples of this? What are some examples of the fact that God is hardwired sowing and reaping into the fabric of the universe? And so the first thing that came to mind was, okay, so in, in Thessalonians, uh, the apostle Paul, he says, if one isn't willing to work, then neither should he eat. And so I'm like, okay, so there's a sewing and reaping there.

If you work, then you eat. And so I was like, trying to think, okay, what's the logic? Well, the logic is that the point of food is to give you energy in part to work. And if you're not willing to use that, if you're not willing to steward that energy and that food faithfully, then you shouldn't eat. You shouldn't get the benefit of it. And so I was like, okay, sowing and reaping. And so there's a logic to this. And so then I just started going down my, again, just, you know, I grew up in church, so all these different passages are flying to mind. So I'm sitting there thinking about the logic of biblical sexuality.

So in God's world and God's vision, you know, you have, um, God has an order to sexuality, so you, you get married and then you're free to enjoy the, the, the fruits of marriage, which is sex and childbearing. Uh, and, and when we start to violate that order, we start to experience all kinds of, and we start to reap all kinds of negative things, all things that hurt us and hurt other people, hurt any children that are the fruits of those endeavors. And so I just started to go through the scriptures and I'm like, okay, this principle of sowing and reaping is everywhere. And then the culminating, again, as a pastor, you can appreciate

this, you culminate in Christ, right? And so what amazed me was like, okay, so whereas in Islam, I've had the conversations with Muslims and they basically don't understand why Jesus had to come to die. They're like, why, Allah can just forgive sins. There doesn't need to be a payment for sin. Whereas in the Christian gospel, we believe that the soul that sins must die. Um, you know, there, if there, if there, there has to be

a payment for sin. And so like Jesus is, he comes because there has to be, he comes to pay for the sins of people. Um, and so he comes to be this payment for sin. And so I started to see, okay, so this logic of sowing reaping, you know, it even applies to something like salvation. You know, this thing exists here. And so I started to, as I'm at the same time thinking about Bitcoin, I started to think about our existing monetary system. And so today we have a monetary system where governments can create money out of thin air. They just either through the issuance of new debt digitally, they can just digitally decide we're gonna create new money in the form of loans to give out to people

or businesses or governments, they can do that. And so that basically, they're creating money out of thin air and basically doing it to fund whatever they want to see subsidized. And so the more that I, again, I had seen firsthand the consequence of this, but one of the things that really impacted me was, okay, so wait, so fiat currency, there's a real sense in which fiat currency represents the denial of sowing and reaping. Like it's saying that we can

reap where we haven't sown and we can get the value of work today and then pay for it at some point in the future. And the reality is that the speed at which this debt is being accumulated and the speed at which we're dragging productivity and value from the future into the present, it's not being done at a level where it's really going to be able to be paid back in our lifetimes, we're actually pushing this off onto our kids and grandkids. And so I started to think about this and I was like, okay, well, that seems horribly unjust. And, you know, whereas I'm sitting here, I'm reading Proverbs and it says that a godly man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. I'm looking at this debt burden that the United States and politicians in our names are stacking up and accumulating.

And what they're doing is the inheritance that we're leaving to our children, my children and my children's children, is this inheritance of debt, to which the scriptures speak incredibly forcefully about. There's all kinds of things. People who would take the scriptures very seriously. People who would say, if the scripture says it, I believe it. Who will look, will look at the apostle Paul when he says, Oh, no man, anything. They'll look that verse directly in the face and says, all right, well, yeah, that's, you know, that, that's, that's just must be, you know, a product of Paul's time, you know, that's not the world we live in anymore. And so this is, again, was another consequence that I started to see is, okay, so what a system

that is built off of debt, rather than money that is debt, one of the effects of it that it has is it marginalizes, it teaches people to marginalize the scripture. It teaches people to basically doubt and to basically not being able to have the same kind of faith basically, or it tempt not being able to have the same kind of faith, basically, it tempts them to not have faith in the scriptures to the same degree that they otherwise would and to a degree that would be justified throughout the rest of human history.

Because this is another big thing is that scarce money has been something that has been a hallmark of every civilization throughout time. It's of productive civilizations, scarce money, whether it's in the form of shells or precious metals or whatever it is, scarce money is a bedrock of a stable nation. And when that starts to go away, then you start to see all kinds of instability in many different forms come to pass. instability in many different forms come to pass. Hey friends, if you're a regular listener to the podcast, you know that I'm a huge fan of AG1. AG1 is a foundational nutritional supplement that gives me an energy boost and no caffeine

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difference for yourself. It's a great first step to investing in your health. And that's why they've been such a proud sponsor for the podcast for so long. Try AG1 and get a free bottle of vitamin D three K two. I take that every other day as well and five free AG one travel packs with your first purchase at drinkag1.com forward slash TITR. Okay. So that's a $48 value for free. If you go to drinkag1.com forward slash TITR, check it out. the it to me and it's just like, whoop, it's like you're speaking Spanish to me. I don't understand how that all works. I'll give you one example. Hopefully this will help articulate it and make it make sense. So one of the temptations, and this is what Gary North talks about in his book, he talks about how just economically there's always a temptation to expand the goods that you have illicitly.

And so the example that he gives is to try to get something without working for it. And so the example that he gives is in wine making. He said, you know, one of the things that you'd have is you'd have sellers of wine who, you know, initially when they're selling their marketing, they're saying this is a hundred percent wine. Like this is great wine. And so they're able to make, you know, there's a certain production cost and then there's a cost that they're selling it for.

And so over time, one of the things that's tempting for these wine makers is to fudge on the amount of wine. So rather than having a hundred percent wine, they can do, all right, let's do 99% wine and 1% water. And so now what you're able to do is you're able to make 1% more profit than the cost of production of this wine. And so this can happen all over the place. We see this today, there's something called shrinkflation. We see this in the form of candy bars. If you look at candy bars, a lot of them, they've shrunk in size. If you look at the same candy

bar from 30 years ago, the same Snickers bar from 30 years ago, it's significantly bigger, even if the price is staying about the same. Then over time, even the price won't stay the same, this price will start to go up. It's this nasty little way of, it can either be done illicitly on the part of the seller themselves or people can be tempted to do it as a consequence of the money itself, this happening to the money itself. And so how does this happen with money itself? Well, in much of human history, you've had gold and silver coins that were used as money. And so just like every other good, there's a production cost to the money itself. So if you're going to make gold or silver coins, what do you have to do? You have to pay someone to go and dig it up out of the ground to, you know,

you have to pay for tools to help them do that. You then have to have, you know, a refining process that takes time and money. Um, you also have to, you know, refine it. You have to, in the case of, you know, modern coins, you have to stamp an image on them. Um, and so all of this thing requires time and resources to produce them. And so the temptation for, you know, especially when it was governments who were, who were, you know, doing this monetary creation, the temptation for them was to rather than use the stated 99% gold or 99% silver, the temptation was for them to start to fudge on the production.

So, hey, let's, let's introduce 1% of iron or something into the coin. It's such a small percentage that it's not perceptible to the person using it. And what has that enabled the government to do? It's enabled them to expand their purchasing power, expand the amount of money in the system by 1% that gives them more purchasing power to do whatever the government wants to do. And so, so this is where, this is where this starts to be, you know, I started to realize, man, this has moral consequences. So you have governments who are trying to expand their purchasing power without

telling their citizens and, and in doing so in a way that isn't perceptible, they're trying to gain an advantage over every other economic actor, over their brothers and sisters, their neighbors. They're trying to gain this thing and use it for their own ends. You're describing what happened when we went off the gold standard, that this is behind the scenes. Yes, this has happened cyclically. that this is behind the scenes. Yes. This has happened cyclically. Again, this has happened in many of the... This is the fault of Roman Empire. You can attribute to this too. Over time, the money got more and more watered down. It had less and less precious metals in it, until the point that, again, the famous example in the Roman Empire is that their army, which had enabled their empire to grow and to become so powerful, enable their country to become so powerful,

their army refused, their soldiers refused to accept their currency. That it became so worthless that they just basically said, we refuse to accept this as payment for what we're doing. And so basically they quit. And so that was part of what led to the downfall of the Roman empire. And so this is, you've seen this in other places,

in other countries, this happens over and over again. The money gets more and more watered down. And then it gets to the point where the money becomes worthless. Everybody recognizes that it doesn't, it doesn't buy the same amount of scarce goods that it did before. And so this, this cycle keeps happening over and over. And the people who are, there's something called the Cantillon effect, which basically is it's basically says those who are closest to's something called the Cantillon effect, which basically is, it basically says,

those who are closest to the point of monetary creation have an outsized advantage over those who are farther from the point of monetary creation. So in the case, the way that this works out in Venezuela is basically when Maduro creates money, he can go out and give that to friends of his and business partners of his. And so they can take that money that is created out of thin air, they can take that and go buy

scarce goods with it before the rest of the economy has been able to like knows that there's so much more, you know, can do the calculus of there being so much more currency units in the, you know, in the system. It basically enables them to buy these scarce goods at prices that would be much higher once everybody comes to this realization. So an example of this that we've experienced would be in COVID. So COVID happens, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that word if you'll get you demonetized or something, but four years ago, you had governments. And so this is again where I have friends

who like President Trump. And I'm like, hey, you can like some of these things, but President Trump sent out the, airdropped these checks to everybody, right? Sent out these checks, airdropped them to people. And this was money created out of thin air. And then within a year of that happening, what was one of the consequences we saw?

We saw housing prices that were going up 30, 40, a hundred percent. Now, why, why was that happening? There's a number of reasons, but one of the reasons was because almost overnight you had way more money, way more dollars that had entered the system. So it was like, basically this is the crazy thing is 80% of all the dollars that were, that have ever existed were created within the first year of COVID. Okay. So, so you have 80% more money, okay.

Competing for more or less the same amount of houses. And so when you have more dollars competing for more houses, for more or less the same amount of houses, the only way for that to work out is for the, the amount that people are willing to offer for houses goes up. And so this is why I started to see, I was talking to friends while we're living in Uruguay during that time, I'm starting to talk to friends in the States and they're like, Hey, people are, people are offering $75,000 over asking. You know, in, in lots of different places.

And so this is, this is the consequence. You know, where, where, where money is, is easily able to be created. lots of different places. And so this is the consequence, where money is easily able to be created. Things that aren't able to be created as easily as that money are gonna go up in value, whether it's homes, whether it's cars, whatever it is. That's just the nature of the way that this works. And so again, for me, I started to see, okay, well, wait a second.

So who's getting impacted by this? I started to see, okay, well, wait a second. So who's getting impacted by this? I started to see, man, the United States, I'm seeing this dynamic and hearing about this dynamic happening in the United States, I'm like, and this is exactly what we're seeing in Uruguay and exactly what our Venezuelan brothers and sisters are seeing, and it's gonna have the same consequences. And so what are those consequences?

Well, people who are especially nonprofit organizations like churches, they're going to be disproportionately impacted by this money printing. Think about it like this, if you have a business, okay, and inflation happens, your cost of production for your goods that you're selling go up. Well, in the short term, you can actually respond to that. You can actually adjust your prices. You can raise your prices and then that can allow you to kind of keep pace with the

inflation, but if you're a nonprofit organization, you're a, you're a Christian school or you're a church or you're a, you some other charity, the only way for you to adapt to that rising level of inflation is for you to either go to your existing donor base and raise more money. Or you have to spend resources that you already don't have and go find new donors and do that however you can. Now that can be done licitly, okay? That can be done totally legitimately.

Your church could grow or whatever. But oftentimes, what this does is it tempts people to be forced to deviate from their initial mission in order to try to survive economically. And so one of the ways that I experienced this was in the Bible college that I went to, the first year that I got there, for the first time in their history, the school had existed for 50 or 60 years, they began offering business courses in order to try to draw in new students who wouldn't otherwise consider their school.

And so again, this was a last gasp, you know, desperate attempt for them to try to make the economics that were increasingly working against them, it was to try to get them to make these things work. And so again, I've seen this, that school actually closed down like a month ago, a month and a half ago. And so in the, yeah, Mike, the college that I went to.

And so I've seen this happen with more and more Christian schools, more and more Christian universities, they're having a harder and harder time making ends meet and while there can be issues of stewardship and issues of, you know, unfaithfulness and all kinds of bad things that it can be, it can be issues of stewardship and issues of, you know, unfaithfulness and all kinds of, you know, bad things that it can be. It can be some of their fault. At the same time, there's many of them who they're struggling to survive for something that isn't their fault. It's the fault of governments and banking entities that are producing more and more money at an ever, ever, you know, increasing rate. And so basically they're, they're out disproportionately affecting people that haven't are just trying to live their

normal life. What would real quick with the produce, because I've heard this, you know, that it's bad for the economy to just print money. Yeah. Why did we do it? I mean, I, yes, I would assume that there's really smart economists that disagree with that, right? Or what would be the counter argument? Correct. And so this is where this gets really interesting, right? And this is where the theology comes in. So the question that really set me down the Bitcoin rabbit hole of like trying to figure out what this thing was, was this question of what is money. Okay.

And so because I'm sitting here, I'm like, okay, I could give an answer to this, but the little question in the back of my mind is by what standard? Like, what is the measuring stick that I'm appealing to to give this understanding? I just realized I don't really have a good one. Like, I don't really have a principled answer for thinking about what money is.

And so a lot of the difference and the difference of opinion that would happen between different economists, it comes down to this question of like, what is money and how do you know? And so one of the things that happens, one of the reasons for this difference is that money is different things to different people and it's different things at different times.

So there's typically, people will largely agree that money is, has, again, has three properties, or has three uses. So money can be a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account. Okay, so store of value. I go out and I work, I deny myself, I go serve my neighbor. My neighbor is grateful for my work and so he gives me something of value in return. Money is the most, it's called

the most saleable good. It's the easiest, it's the thing that makes up most transactions in our economy. So a store of value, basically this is a way to store the value of the work that I've done. That's one function of money. Another function of money is a medium of exchange. This is probably the one that most people think about today. It's the most easily accessible. This is the thing that I give in exchange for other stuff. That's definitely true of what a money is.

But then a unit of account. This is this principle of money is something by which we denominate most everything else. So when we go to the store, you're not going to see prices on the shelf of how much are these almonds? Well, this bucket of almonds is 12 bananas. We don't do that. Scarce goods like that, commodities, they don't make good monies by and large. These are three uses for money. What happens is you have people, a lot of economists today, they will focus primarily

on this medium of exchange. They'll talk about the importance of, it's called like the velocity of money. What is the rate at which money is moving through an economy? Their belief is that we need to have money moving through. The most important thing is that we have money liquid in the economy, moving through the economy as fast as we can. Now, again, that is an important thing. That obviously is an important thing. People need to have enough money in the system that allows economic transactions to happen.

But the question is, is there an order in which these, is there an order to these characteristics of money? And how does something, what is the process for money coming into existence? Is this something that is just a government creation? Is this something that is a free market chosen thing? Again, this is where I started to get really interested in this. A lot of people today, we just assume that our money

today is government created. It's created by the government. The government makes it, they give it its value, it's got their seal on it, it's got their name, whatever, this is used here. It's value, it's got their seal on it. It's got their name, whatever, this is used here. And so what I just began to realize as I was studying monetary history was like, this hasn't always been the case. Now, for large parts of human history, you had gold and silver serving as money.

And it wasn't some sort of government entities stating, you have to accept gold or silver. People valued gold and silver because of properties that it had. And then what you had over time was the government would put their stamp on this certain amount of gold or silver to say, actually, this is 100% silver

or 99% silver or whatever it is. It was more of a verification. They would validate the intrinsic value that's already there. Exactly, validating that this is what it says it is, it wasn't the government saying, we're going to create this, we're gonna give this money value. And so that move is what happened in 1913

with the creation of the Federal Reserve. And so once that starts to happen, like that's, it's, okay. So have you heard of Jamie Smith, James K. Smith? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so Jamie, he wrote this book called You Are What You Worship. And so in this book, he talks about the fact that every,

what is it, every pedagogy is rooted in a philosophical anthropology, to which I'm sure all of your listeners are like, amen, I totally agree. You know, it's like super heady, okay? So basically what he's saying is every pedagogy, every approach to teaching is rooted in a philosophical anthropology,

and it's rooted in an understanding of what it means to be human. And so I heard about that probably 10 years ago, and I think about it three or four times a year, if not more, I think about it all the time, because I'm just like, that is so profound. And so as I was getting into thinking about money, I just started thinking about money,

and I'm like, wait a second. Every money, every currency, every monetary system is also rooted in a philosophical anthropology. It's also rooted in understanding what it means to be human. And so this is how this works out. So if you believe that money is is, is just a government creation. And the primary reason that it's important is because it gives governments

the ability to control the economy. Well, then you're going to, you're going to look for a money that looks a certain way, you're going to look for a currency that is shaped a certain way that is created a certain way. And so for instance, why has government chosen fiat currency? Well, because it allows them to create money out of thin air. It allows them to do it very easily. There's very little cost.

It's they can take the same piece of paper and put a hundred on it. And it's worth a hundred times the same piece of paper that just has a one. So it's very efficient. It's very effective for the specific governmental ends that the existing governments have for it. It gives them lots of control. Now the downside of the existing monetary system is that it basically allows normal people

the value of their labor that they're trying to store in this money, it allows that money to be taken from them, abstracted from them, in a way that they really don't have control over. Now gold or silver, okay, gold or silver is shaped very differently. So, gold and silver prioritizes, it values the scarce labor and scarce goods. Basically, it's just another thing in that respect.

So, gold has a production cost, as we talked about, just like soybeans or whatever it is. The gold also has a production cost. And so gold scarcity allows scarce people with scarce time to effectively save and deny themselves and save the value of their labor over time in ways that are much harder for anybody, whether it's a government or some sort of private counterfeiting ring to take away the value of. This is what I realized.

This is why I'm spending at least this portion of my life doing what I'm doing is because literally these monetary problems are actually theological problems. What we're seeing as monetary and economic problems are actually rooted in a theological understanding of what it means to be human and what it looks like to live in the world. Can I add to that? And I wonder if this is like a no brainer for you and a Christian approach to Bitcoin, but in the Old Testament, land, access to land was access to wealth and land

is arguably the, or one of the most central themes, at least in the old Testament. I would even say the overarching unfolding story of scripture from Eden to new creation and so on. Correct. Well, land was very intentionally. Well, access to land was put in the power of the people. And any, any government official, let's say a King, you know, Ahab and others that tried to exert power control over the people's land. That was a, that was on par with murder, adultery. I mean, you don't do that. The land belongs to the power of the people. And even in Joshua and Numbers,

we see that the distribution of the land, the size of the land depended on the pond, the size of the tribe. Like there was a, not perfect equality, but I would say very relative, relative equality. People, and even in the Old Testament, we have a system of, if you can work, you should work. If you can work, you're an able-bodied human and you are not working. That is sin. And when I say work, I'm talking sunup, sundown, six days a week. We're talking 50 to 70 hours

a week or yeah. So yeah, roughly. So there is a principle of hard work built into it. And so all the capitalists go, yay. You know, not now there was, if you fell upon hard times, a bunch of starving bunnies ripped through your carrot patch, you know, your some like there were safety nets through the power of the people that were built in the year of Jubilee, the seven year Sabbath and so on. And the, the, the don't harvest the edges of your grain. Not, not so that an able-bodied person can come eat who's too lazy to work, but so that the elderly, the orphan, the widow, the people that don't have access or physically can't work, can, can, can depend upon the,

the work of others. So, so there is a kind of a blend of some socialistic ish values, not socialism as it is today, but like, you know, people helping others out. Well, a hundred percent. So this is, I a hundred percent agree. So this is, this is where, again, this is where you have to like look these right in the face. So the other example of this is, is the distribution of the land. This is distribution of the promised land. What does God do? He, He like squares off the entire land and like gives it to each family.

To the people. To each family, to the people, yeah. The government, the elites, the government, the kings, the leaders, they are completely divorced from the people's access to wealth. Is that, would that be a main biblical argument in favor of something like this? Yes, so basically what I, my basic contention

is that governments were never, they were never intended like to have this type of godlike power. Like the difference is this. So really, again, we could sit here and talk about, so if you're trying to figure out what is money, you have to figure out what is the standard by which you're answering this question. And you can't get too far in trying to answer that question

until you have to answer another question, which is what is government? And so this, because again, like what are the responsibilities of government? And so again, I look around, like I look around at our world today. And again, you could just descriptively, like we are in a moment of definitional crisis

where people are struggling to figure out like what, like what are men, what are women, what is marriage, what is government? You could go down the list of like, and people just don't have answers to this. And you can just sit here and you're like, well, yeah, I mean, if you don't have an agreement on these things, it's going to be really hard. You're going to have a fractured society. You're going to have, like, it's going to be really hard to get things done. And you're going have a fractured society. You're gonna have, like, it's gonna be really hard to get things done, and a lot of, and you're gonna have lots of things breaking down. And so, again, I would expect to see exactly

what we're seeing right now, you know, if that was the case. So, again, I think that this is, you know, getting back down to, we had initially, when we were talking, before we hopped on here, we talked about the fact of, like, you know, you asked, like, do you come from, like, more of like a libertarian background?

Yeah. And I basically said, the difficulty with even answering that question is because we talk about the government as if it's like this one equal, everyone agrees on like, this is what government is. When reality, like when I look at the government, I definitely see, like I would probably get described as more of a libertarian, but it's because when I look at the government, I look at it like a morbidly obese person who like it's so morbidly obese, it's taken, it's consumed so many things and taking on so much weight and responsibility for things that are outside of its purview that it can't even do the things that it was designed to do. And so I look at it like this.

And so again, again, compared to a lot of people, I probably would get, you know, called a libertarian, more libertarian, but it's just got to do with the fact of like, the government was never intended to do everything. And we have a government that by virtue of the fact that it creates money and can create money out of thin air to fund anything that it wants to around the world, both here and around the world, it's gotten to this level where it's become worthless to in a lot of ways. Okay. Can I on the political side? Cause this is just my very small observation based on limited, you know, uh, evidence. It seems like the types of people that are into Bitcoin would be more either on the right political right or libertarian, which doesn't really fit neatly in, you know, but you know, it's not, it's not, it's just an own kind of thing. Whereas people on the left, which would be more pro big government are against

it. It was that too clean. Is that a general generally true observation? I would say it's a generally true observation, but even with saying that, again, this is why this is not... It is a political issue. Money is political just by its nature. But at the same time, there's tons of things. Imagine, at least in name, the left has, they care for the downtrodden. Right? Like this is a lot of what the policies

that the left wants to pass are done. Or the justification for them is, hey, we need to care for people who don't have someone to care for them. Like we need to have this safety net for older people. And like, okay, so now what could be more in line with that idea than the fact that the government, like one of the greatest causes of income inequality is the fact that idea, then the fact that the government, like one of the greatest causes of income

inequality is the fact that governments through creating like trillions and trillions of new dollars are stealing the purchasing power of the weakest among us. Like it actually is. So the current financial system actually ends up hurting the poor, not helping the poor. A hundred percent. It preys on the poor in order to, basically to the benefit of those who have scarce assets. So if you have scarce assets,

they will get more valuable over time. This is what you were talking about, your stock portfolio. This is why one of the best things, largely speaking, that you could do for stocks over the last 40, 50 years is just to really just leave them. Because again, there's variables to that. There's technological innovations,

companies that come along. But in large part, you don't really need to trade in and out of them day to day, because those scarce assets are gonna go up in value over time. Poorer people don't have access to scarce resources like homes or whatever. And so their cost of living, both from their food, their rent,

whatever it is, all of those things are getting exponentially more expensive. Again, here in the United States, we're starting to see these things. But again, every country on earth, I mean, almost every country on earth over the last 50 years since the United States went off the gold standard, the United States and by virtue of the United States going off, the rest of the world going off of the gold standard, the United States and by virtue of the United States going off, the rest of the world going off of, the gold standards, having a currency that's connected to a scarce good, they've seen their currencies fail three or four times.

And so imagine, this is where this really clicked for me, was I was a pastor in Uruguay, I'm looking around, we didn't have enough money to buy a building, but what I also saw was that very few churches were able to afford their own buildings. And so imagine, you know, again, since three or four times these currencies have failed since 1971. So on average, every 13, 14 years, the currency fails. So imagine Preston, you have, you know, you found a church and, you know, your church starts growing.

People are being incredibly generous. They start giving. You start saving up to buy a building. You start saving up to buy a building. You start saving up to hire additional staff. And then after, you know, you do this for 10 years, you are two months away from being able to, you know, pay cash for a building, praise the Lord, and your currency fails. And so now that money that your people denied themselves for years and gave sacrificially is now becomes worthless. And so this is the effect. We've seen this happen all over the world. And so, it's disproportionately affecting the poorest people,

not only in the States, but the poorest people around the world. And so I look at this and I'm just like, as a Christian who cares deeply about the name of Christ being proclaimed and known in the nations, like missions efforts get harder and harder with every year that goes by. You know, the missionaries themselves, when we were, from when we started raising support to go to Uruguay, we were living in a big city, the amount

of money that we had to raise changed. It increased about $2,000 over the course of seven years. And so, what does that look like? That means I, as a missionary, have to spend more time reaching out to people in the United States, reaching out to churches and people in trying to raise this money. And so it's this hamster wheel that makes people have to think about money to an increasing degree, and it has all kinds of other negative effects.

So one of the things that I love about Bitcoin and this topic of getting at the root of a lot of these, it kind of gets cuts to the heart of a lot of these things that are otherwise made to be partisan issues. So one of the effects of this, or one example of this is immigration. Immigration is this hugely controversial thing. You have on the right, you have people saying, hey, this isn't sustainable to have millions of people

coming into your country and then also paying for them to, you know, for healthcare for them and all these kinds of things. And they're right. Okay, that's unsustainable over time. On the left, you have people saying, but these are people, you know, these are largely people who are suffering

in their own countries. They can't afford to live and they're right. Okay, so the best, now again, I have, we had people in our church in Uruguay who were Venezuelans, again, I love them to death. Now, if we just took a step back and we didn't just think about this from the standpoint of how is this going to affect me?

And we answered the question, what would be in the best interest of, in this case, the Venezuelan people? The thing that would be in the best interest of them would be if they didn't have to leave their wives and kids, and didn't have to leave their countries whom they loved, and didn't have to try to seek shelter in some other currency, in some other economy, other places. We can probably all agree that would be the ideal situation. That would be the most sustainable thing.

Now again, why are most of those people leaving these countries? They're moving because their currency has gone to zero numerous times, and they're trying to get to a more stable thing so that they can provide for their families. Now, what on God's earth does that have to do with Bitcoin? Well, one of the prime examples that we've seen of this is in the country of El Salvador. El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender a number of years ago. By making Bitcoin legal tender, one of the things, one of the consequences of this is that Bitcoin is one part of the equation.

They've seen a reversal, a large reversal in the immigration trends that saw El Salvador as one of the highest countries sending people into the United States. That is just fact that Bitcoin, having a scarce currency that you're able to save in, that gets more valuable over time rather than less valuable, it's starting to turn the thing. It's actually helping to bring some economic stability. They also have a president who's helped to bring some political stability, who's exercised a willingness to crack down on a lot of the gang activities.

So I'm not trying to sit here and say Bitcoin is this panacea that fixes everything, but it's one tool in the tool belt, a scarce currency, whether it's gold or Bitcoin, whatever it is, a scarce currency helps to bring stability to otherwise desperate people. And so I look at this and I'm just like, okay, rather than just sitting here bickering left and right and never being able to come to an agreement because there's this elephant in the room that both sides are ignoring, that's literally the root of a lot of the immigration that you're seeing. If we talk about this thing and we start to see changes on that level, it's actually much more productive.

And it allows both sides to acknowledge the truthfulness in what the other side is raising up while still having, you know, still basically providing a path forward that isn't just, you know, the, the existing paradigm for either of those things. I, I do want to add a little side note here. A lot of the immigration problems, even instability in places like Venezuela are due in part to the U S correct. Oh yeah. US back coups because Venezuela is on huge oil reserves and the United States can't have an oil reserve that it doesn't have its hand into. So because of economic self interest in the U S we will establish a, if they don't, if the Venezuelans don't vote in the right person, we will take care of that. We'll get the person in that we want

to have in so that we can have access to the oil in summary. So all that's what's missed in the immigration debates is like all these people fleeing to the end of the U S because of instability in their countries. How much of that is blowback from our 100% anyway, that's another discussion. No, no, it's a fantastic, it's a fantastic point that again, I think is, is more and more common with younger people. Like I would say like the millennials, like we're more, I feel like percentage wise, and maybe this isn't true, maybe this is just ignorance and love, I feel like there's more and more of a recognition of that than at least I've experienced in my lifetime.

Again, living in Uruguay, we saw, I mean, you can actually look at this. I mean, a lot of these things, these coups have to do with currency. So you had Muammar Gaddafi. Muammar Gaddafi said that he was gonna start buying oil with gold. And then all of a sudden we needed a little freedom.

All of a sudden the US decided that Libya needed some good old democracy. And the same thing happened with Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein wanted to start selling oil and gold and all of a sudden he needed a little democracy too. And so this is absolutely, it's not just like this, what you use as money actually is a hugely political thing that has resulted over time. And a lot of this kind of intervention that you're seeing, I want to come back to. So, and this comes back to kind of like, what is big, draw me

a picture of what Bitcoin is because it does, it's not linked to a precious metal, right? And it does fluctuate. I mean, I told you, I think offline, like, I think it was in 2020, somebody that respects says you should buy Bitcoin. You know, I'm like, all right, we'll buy, we'll spend a little bit. Don't want to roll the dice too much, you know? And then bam, it dropped in half, you know, I'm like crap, you know? So what, how, maybe explain what it is. Is it just an electronic idea? It's immaterial, right? And how is that terribly different than the current monetary system?

Correct, yes. And so the primary difference, so it's a digital ledger. Okay, so again, this is what it does. It's kind of weird, but it's a digital ledger and it's an open ledger. So anybody who wants to can basically run a copy of the Bitcoin ledger. They can download it. can basically run a copy of the Bitcoin

ledger. They can download it. It's relatively small. You can download it. And you can see like a ledger of every single Bitcoin transaction that's ever taken place. And so you can validate for yourself, like, Oh, look, there's this transaction I sent. I can see that it was sent here. It actually was verified. It actually went through, here it is. Now that is contrasted with something that we have within existing banking institutions, which is just private ledgers.

So if you were to go to Wells Fargo and say, hey, I want to see your ledger entry, I want to make sure that you guys have actually, you actually have, I want to see your books, make sure you have the money you say that you have. They're going to be like kick rocks, my guy. They're not going to do that. And so again, this is the type of the radical transparency that the creator of Bitcoin wanted to create as a way to basically be a completely like the polar opposite of the existing system.

So now what this looks like is there was a number of things that were kind of set in stone from the beginning. So one of these things, what the creator decided that there were only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin. So this was like a, you know, a rule that was set within the Bitcoin protocol and basically you can't change it going forward. It's, it's impossible to change the rule. Again, you'd have to literally the amount of energy that you'd have to expend, it would be literally impossible, it's impossible.

So that's, they just said, all right, there's gonna be, we're gonna, it's just like God created in the world. We're gonna put, we're gonna define where things begin, where things end, and so the number of Bitcoin in existence is one of these things. So 21 million Bitcoin. And that never change, that will never change,

it will always be 21. Never change, yep. Never change, impossible to change. And again, when you say that's 21 million of them, that's just a ledger, even that doesn't really, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I a broader point. And this is why I say, like, poor,

like I almost said Spanish, like por favor, like please, like you do not need to understand Bitcoin in order to use and benefit from Bitcoin. Because I guarantee you 99.9% of the people listening to this podcast do not understand how the existing financial system works. Like it is, in terms of the mechanics of it, you do not understand it.

All you know is that it works when you need it to. And that same thing is true of Bitcoin. So where does Bitcoin come from? How do you access? So these 21 million Bitcoin exist, but how do people get access to them? And so this access happens through a process called Bitcoin mining. Now, this is a highly controversial thing among different segments because of it involves energy usage. And so what this requires is there's only two ways to get Bitcoin. One is either to buy a specialized computer

that is designed only to mine Bitcoin. And you have to basically, largely when people do this, they have lots of these computers. So you have to pay for you know, largely when people do this, they have lots of these computers. So you have to pay for the electricity, the energy needed to power them, which requires a lot of energy. You also need someone to service them when they break. You need a place to keep them.

There's all kinds of just, again, there's a production cost to Bitcoin. So there's certain, a special kind of computer. Correct, correct. That you have to go buy that, I don't know what that means, mining. Yes. I think a physical rock or something, but mining. Exactly, so the term of mining,

it comes from the fact that there, again, to the same thing I do, the same idea that we talked about with gold, there's a production cost. There's also a production cost for Bitcoin in a way that there is not a production cost for Fiat, for Fiat currency. The overwhelming majority of Fiat currency is created digitally, just created digitally. It's not even printed. We've all seen the money printer go brr memes. And then that

actually is part of it. And again, the production costs, we're like, well, there is paper and there is, it's like, yes, okay, yes, there is, but it's minimal when again, the same piece of paper can have a hundred on it and it's worth a hundred when again, the same piece of paper can have 100 on it and it's worth 100 times more than the same piece of paper that has one on it. So you need it, there's only two ways to get Bitcoin. One is to invest in the computers, the energy, all these kinds of stuff, and then actually mine it,

or to buy Bitcoin from somebody who's already done that process. So it's actually, now again, why does this matter? Because again, the scarcity and the value of this, the concreteness comes in part from the fact that there is real world scarce energy that has to be sacrificed in order to produce Bitcoin. There's no free lunches. There's no free Bitcoin out there. And then you have people who say, oh, well, it's just this digital thing. You know, you can, and you can just create it out of thin air. It's like, okay,

well then go ahead and go try to do it. Go try to convince someone to give you Bitcoin for free. You won't be able to do it. Like one Bitcoin today is $60,000. And that just continues to go up over time as more and more people understand it. More and more people are incentivized to do it. Can you, can you explain the fluctuation then? Like why did my Bitcoin drop in half within a few months of I bought it? And I think it's correct. I think it's gone back up, but that to me, it seems like back in the gold and silver trading a goat for a donkey

kind of days, like that would never have happened. Like a donkey's worth a donkey of goats, you know? So this isn't really taken us back to that original monetary system, is it? Or is it just in its early stages and- Correct. So this is, okay, here's an example that I give of this. Okay, so imagine if, imagine that you have a baby and you're super excited. You're like, wow, this is incredible.

And somebody goes, well, that baby's not even a human. And you're like, what do you mean it's not a human? And the guy goes, well, listen, the scriptures say that we're supposed to be fruitful multiply, can this baby be fruitful multiply? No, he can't. So like, how is this a human? He can't even fulfill the guidelines that God gave

to what it means to be human. And your answer would be like, dude, yeah. You'd be like, dude, calm down. Like this, the baby is like a couple of days old. Like it's going to happen. Like this thing is, it's got all of days old. It's going to happen. It's got all of the requisite hardware for this to happen. It's just not reached a level of maturity where this can happen. And so what we're seeing in real time is with Bitcoin, you're seeing money be born and grow up before your very eyes. And it's reaching all the checkpoints that you would expect money to go through.

It's just because there's only one government on earth. I'll never forgive Bukele, the president of El Salvador for ruining this otherwise perfect illustration that I had. As a former pastor, I do understand the value, how we cherish our beautiful illustrations. But up until El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender, every single Bitcoin transaction had been voluntary. Everyone, it was an opt, complete opt in. Like you, I voluntarily choose to participate in this network to own Bitcoin.

Nobody was forcing people to buy Bitcoin. Now that's changed a little bit. And you know, there's some nations that are taking more and more steps than that. But this is one of these things where, so with the fluctuation, okay, what is going on with the fluctuation? The fluctuation is actually... This is like a little bit of a mind-messer-upper, because

in reality, the Bitcoin is not changing. One Bitcoin is one Bitcoin. The Bitcoin is not changing in any way whatsoever. What is changing is the amount of dollars that someone is willing to give and receive for a Bitcoin. There's actually two things going on. What you're learning is what do people value a Bitcoin at? But you're also valuing what do people value a dollar at?

This is another thing that Americans have a really hard time understanding because we've had the incredible privilege of only having to think in one currency. It's a huge blessing. It's much more efficient. It saves us time. It saves us brain power, all these things. And so we think of everything in just in dollars. And we just do that. But almost everybody else on earth has to think in at least two currencies. They might think in dollars. That's going to be the savings account for lots of people all over the world. If they can get dollars in saving them, they're going to do that because it's so much less

volatile than their local currency. But then they also have to think in local currencies. They have to do this calculation constantly. Is this a good time to exchange the goods that I have for my currency at this point? Are we at a high or a low? And so they're constantly having to figure out whether or not it's a good time to exchange. Now, Bitcoin is still a baby. Bitcoin has been around for 15 years, but only 1% to 2% of people on earth own any of it. And so it's easy for large entities to move the price up and down of Bitcoin.

But again, the fact that they're, so the fact that Bitcoin's price is changing rapidly doesn't do anything. It doesn't have any material impact on Bitcoin itself in how it works and how it operates. You're talking about, you know, it's like this. Here's another example I give all the time. So if somebody were to say,

if you were to say Jesus is Lord, and somebody goes, well, no, he's not. Like look at all, there's billions of people who don't even acknowledge Jesus. And you're like, well, no, no, no, but he actually is Lord. Like he is the King of the universe. Like it doesn't matter,

let God be true and every man a liar. You could sit here and like, this is literally the same kind of argument. It's like Bitcoin is money. People are like, but it's not though. Like, you know, most people aren't accepting it. And it's like, okay, but, but it accept people accepting it does not say anything about whether or not it is money. Can it serve those three functions for which money can be used? And absolutely how you define money, right? People think it's not a paper dollar or it's not tangible, but that's not necessarily, you

can't reduce the definition of money to the dollar. Exactly. And so you're talking about maturity. The other example I give is this. So again, the volatility makes it seem like this is somehow a downside. This is a reason to avoid Bitcoin for a lot of people. They're like, I'm going to wait until it gets stable. Okay. Now I want you to think about, imagine if an alien came down. Imagine if an alien came down and he asked you, he looks at this fruits and vegetables and he's like, hey,

where do those come from? And you go, okay, well, yeah. So, imagine you're a farmer. We plant these seeds in the ground and then they start to grow over time. Then they produce these trees and these bushes and whatever. So the alien's like, okay, cool, tell me more. He goes, yeah. So then the trees and the bushes, they produce these fruits and vegetables. So the alien's like, wow, that's incredible. That seems almost like magic. And you're like, yeah, it's pretty great. And then, you know, we get to the point where we harvest them and we eat them

and they actually sustain us. They give us life. And, you know, if we didn't have this, the nutritional benefit, we would die. And so the guy, the alien is like, wow, that's pretty, I mean, it's pretty an important part of your life. And so you're like, yeah. And so then a couple of months later, everything dies.

And the alien goes, what do you mean? This thing that gives you the vital life source that you need to survive, everything dies. And you're like, well, yeah, no, everything dies. And so the alien goes, well, that seems really volatile. Like, why would you be so dependent on a system that's so volatile? And you'd go, well, no, I mean,

because everything usually, it comes back. And you're like, well, no, I mean, because everything usually it comes back. And you're like, well, they only goes, well, how do you know it's gonna come back? And you go, well, there's no guarantee. We don't have like a contract or something, but just this is the nature. Like there's biological and different variables that are undergirding, just growth of vegetables

and fruits and all these things that result that result in, you know, it normally coming back under normal circumstances. So real quick, so you said 21 million Bitcoin, one to 2% are involved. What would happen to the price of 10% of the population? So you see an exponential growth in the price of Bitcoin. So does now what if it goes down to half a percent? Is the only way the price of Bitcoin would go down and stay down as if people start more and more people start pulling out? Is it that simple? No, so that's part of it. But here's the, this is the, and most people think that that's the case. And so that's where the accusations of being a bubble or speculative, you know, mania or whatever, you know, if where the accusations of being a bubble or speculative,

you know, mania or whatever. You know, if you've heard of like the tulip crisis, have you heard about this? Okay. So there was like this tulip mania in, um, shoot in the Netherlands like a few hundred years ago. And so like the price of tulips went like parabolic for a couple, like for a couple of months or something, and then it collapsed and it never, it never happened again. And so to this day, people accuse Bitcoin of being just another tulip mania. The problem is the tulip bubble never re-inflated. Bitcoin has these cycles where Bitcoin, again, very similar to food production, it has these cycles. And the cycles are built around the fact that there's this mechanism

within Bitcoin that every four years, the new issuance, the new daily issuance of Bitcoin, so the amount of Bitcoin that is, you know, like able to be accessed every day, so the new supply, all the other stuff that's been mined is out there in the wild, but every day, every 10 minutes, there's a new block of Bitcoin that gets mined. And so every block of Bitcoin has three point today, it has three point, uh,

three point one, two, five, um, Bitcoin that gets accessed every four years. That amount gets cut in half. Okay. So this just happened in May that are a mayor, no April, April. Uh, it just happened. So before April 20th, the daily supply or daily issuance, the block reward was 6.2, whatever Bitcoin. Now it's 3.125 Bitcoin. So what you have is you have more and more people over the course of time, buying

into Bitcoin, understanding it, being incentivized to look for something other than their local currency to save in, to invest in, whatever. More and more people are doing it. And with every year that goes by, or every four years that go by, it's more scarce than it was the year before. So, again, if tomorrow, half the world stopped using it, you would in the short term, you'd see a giant movement in Bitcoin's price, dollar denominated price.

Again, it would look better in other currencies, but in the dollar it would look, so again, this is the thing is you can't even compare, because again, it's all, it's relative, right? The dollar is in a way better place than the Venezuelan Bolivar. And so the ratio of Bitcoin to Bolivars is going to be different than the ratio of dollars to Bitcoin.

I was going to ask you a question, but then I feel like even the nature of the question misses the point of Bitcoin, which leads to another question. My question is this. I was going to say, how confident are you that it's going to go up? Like should we, I got 95% sure. Like, dude, if you put money in now in five, 10 years, you's going to go up? Like should we, I got 95% sure. Like dude, if you put money in now in five, 10 years, you're going to make a lot of money. But then it's like, well, wait a minute. That sounds like gambling. That doesn't sound like the original purpose of money. If I'm like, well, can I make money off of doing nothing by pain? And now, you know, so help me understand that the, the, yeah, I get, well, yeah, I guess

just maybe to answer the question. It's a, it's a great question. It's a great question. And again, I tell people all the time, like a lot of people's perceptions of Bitcoin are what they are because of from where they're, from, from where they're hearing about Bitcoin, where they initially hear about Bitcoin from. So a lot of Americans, Americans think about Bitcoin as a speculative investment vehicle because they're hearing about it from that standpoint on CNBC or MSNBC. You hear about the high school kid that bought in and two years later is a billionaire or whatever.

Exactly. Exactly. Again, but that was by no means the reason why Bitcoin was created. You can go back and verify all this. Again, this was not junior high kids on the internet just having fun. You can go back and read for 10, 15 years before this, very intelligent people who were very keenly aware of human rights,

like the human rights impact of something like Bitcoin, if it were to exist, just privacy interests. There's tons of reasons why this matters that go beyond just, we're gonna get rich or something. I would also compare this, again, the way to compare this would be the existence of heaven. Okay, so you're gonna go to heaven, okay?

Heaven is a reality, right? We're gonna spend eternity with God, okay? Now, do we want to go to heaven because we get all of these cool things that go with it? It's like, no, we want God. Okay. Now, do we want to go to heaven because we get like all of these cool things that go with it? It's like, no, we want God. And so we get heaven thrown in. And so like with Bitcoin, like the point is the point of money is like the, well, money does a number of things on a different number of different levels. So again, scarce money is basically one way of acknowledging God's Lordship, is the fact

that we live in a world of scarce things. God made a scarce world. And so, by submitting to having a scarce money, it's one way of saying, all right, Lord, we agree with you that we're not in a world where we're the gods, or we can just create limitless things anytime we want to. So that's one thing. And then also just on the human and love your neighbor level, again, non-scarce money has been disastrous on a hundred different levels.

Again, I think about, again, I mean, I look at, you look at, I mean, basically money is liquid power. It enables you to subsidize any idea or belief that you have for better or for worse. And so again, what has been some of the outflows of this on a US level, okay? Well, the United States subsidizes African abortions.

We spend hundreds of millions of dollars that's created out of thin air. We send it over to Africa and fund all kinds of African abortions. Now, oh yeah, 100%. And so, and again, that's not even to speak of all the wars that we talked about. It's not to speak of all the coups, all of these things, basically like the current,

like currencies are one element of control and like unlimited fiat currencies are functional ways that give governments God-like power. And so like this is, so at the, at the end of the day, like this is a big issue. Like this is a big consequential issue that again, even if Bitcoin like, yeah, the money, like the, the monetary return is, is way down the list of, of reasons why Bitcoin is important. Bitcoin is going to be valuable because it does all these, has all these other impacts. So it's removing my money, which I have sewed and I'm reaping from the government messing with that and redistributing the money that I've already sewed to fund all kinds of, and

I'm, so I'm totally on board with that. So, yeah. So if in theory, say we, I took all of my, whatever liquid assets, retirement, whatever, and just pulled it out of the government system, put into Bitcoin. That's one way to protect my money from being used or devalued over time too. Now you're saying in the, in the, in the meantime, there could be some devalued. I could, I put in 10 grand. It could go down to five grand, could go down to three grand. It could go back up to seven. So there's gonna be some volatility. How confident are you in the long run?

I already know how you would define that 10, 50 years, well, hopefully not 50, I'll be dead by then. Might be dead in 10 years. How confident are you personally? You're not giving financial advice or whatever, but it's going to go up. Yeah, and so again, so my only way to answer this question, I mean, again, the Lord, again, I have no idea what could happen. You know, like I'm not, I'm not sitting here like

you have to, you know, grabbing people by the lapels and, you know, but no, it's like at the same time, if you look at, if you look at the incentives, okay. Like people, people think about Bitcoin, they're like, Oh, this is just people trying to get rich quickly. And reality, I and a bunch of other people who are into Bitcoin, it's like, no, no, no, Bitcoin is designed so you don't get poor quickly. It's designed so that you don't get the value of your, the money that you do have so that it doesn't lose value quickly because that is happening. Whether or not, regardless of Bitcoin existing, you already have this problem that you have to figure out a solution to. One of the things that I told you was I don't think of Bitcoin, it's not in a panacea, it's

not an end all be all thing. Because we are physical beings who have real physical needs. I'm not saying sell your house and buy Bitcoin necessarily. If you live in a ginormous house and you could downsize, like that might be a different thing. I'm not saying, you know, don't own land or don't own precious metals or whatever. The reality is there's different threat models and Bitcoin is, it basically counteracts a number of those threat models, including ones that are somewhat time bound.

So again, if you're, this is one of the cool things. So if you're our Venezuelan brothers and sisters, right? They're sitting here and they, a lot of them left Venezuela on foot. They had to walk across the border. They didn't have enough money to pay for a plane ticket. And so they had to bring as much valuables with them as they, as they could. That was the only way they could do it. If they had like a bag of gold and silver, there's people who are waiting on the border.

They know people were walking across the border with their life savings or whatever. And so they'd become an easy target for being robbed. With Bitcoin, one of the incredible things is you can memorize a 12 word passphrase in your head, cross any border in the world. Nobody even knows that you have it. You could tattoo it on your body and do whatever, and you can get to where you're going, and you can start over with, I mean, literally,

theoretically billions of dollars just by virtue of doing that. So I think like Bitcoin, it has these properties that make it a timely tool to be used by people everywhere, including Christians for the advance of the gospel. I know I have friends who are in countries around the world where the SWIFT system is blocked for them. So they can't send dollars. You can't send dollars from a US bank account to a bank account in those countries. So Middle East, Russia right

now, and you can still send Bitcoin all day long. And so some of them, their missions organizations, send them Bitcoin because they can't send dollars. Bitcoin is solving issues on that front as well. Again, there's a bunch of levels at which the incentives for people, Bitcoin overcomes problems that nothing else in this moment does. People have access to it. I think Bitcoin is going to continue to grow in value as more and more people wake up to, again, the completely independent thing that's happening to them with fiat currency, they're going to be looking, it's going to start them. It's going to motivate them to start to look for alternatives and Bitcoin is going to be there to be one of those alternatives.

Jordan, I got a lot more questions, man. We're just getting started, but I got another minute, man. You've given us a lot to think, man. We're just getting started, but I got another minute, man. You've given us a lot to think about where can people find your work or hear more about this if they want to dig deeper. Yeah. So I was one of the authors of a book called, thank God for Bitcoin, the creation, corruption and redemption of money. You can find that on our website or on Amazon. Our website is tgfp.com. Again, we exist to help Christians understand and use Bitcoin for the glory of God and the

good of people everywhere. I host a couple podcasts. You can find those there. We write articles and a bunch of stuff. And then we do, we just got done doing our big conference, which was in Nashville. So yeah, you can find out more information there. Awesome. Thanks man.

Twitter. Yeah. Thanks for being a guest on The Elgin Ron, man. Really appreciate it. Appreciate you. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Greetings and God bless. This is Tyler Burns. And this is Dr. Jamar Tisby. And we want to invite you to check out our podcast, Pass the Mic, Dynamic Voices for

a Diverse Church. Pass the Mic has been speaking directly to the core concerns of black Christians for over a decade. On our show, we've got interviews from theologians, historians, actors, activists, and so much more. Not to mention heartfelt, open dialogue on some of the heaviest issues facing the church in the United States. Be sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube,

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