Why Bitcoiners Should Become Catholic
Bitcoin and the Catholic Church: could two things be any more different and at odds with one another?
In fact, after reading this article, I hope to convince you that Bitcoin is not only compatible with the Catholic Church, but also that Bitcoiners should become Catholics themselves.
Why Bitcoin and the Catholic Church Seem to Be at Odds
Centralization vs. Decentralization
Bitcoin runs as a peer-to-peer network of computers (let's call them nodes, though special nodes exist, for example, mining nodes). This network is decentralized, meaning that these nodes are being run all over the world by a diverse group of people, most of whom don't know each other, and connect to one another is way that is ad hoc and not centrally controlled and planned.
So Bitcoin is DECENTRALIZED, while the Catholic Church appears to be the epitome of CENTRALIZATION.
The Catholic Church is a hierarchical organization, with the Pope at the top, the bishops under him, priests under the bishops, and then the lay people under the priests.
How then can these seemingly irreconcilable entities be harmonized?
While the Pope does have universal jurisdiction over the Church, one of the Church's key principles is called subsidiarity.
Subsidiarity means that problems should be solved at the level closest to the source.
To use an analogy from civic life, let's say that a wind storm has blown a tree across a county road somewhere out in a rural area of the country. Do we need the federal government to convene and order people from one thousand miles away to travel there, form a plan in a committee, and then remove the tree?
Of course not. Instead, a local resident who uses that road may just chainsaw it into pieces and clear the road. Or, a resident reports it to the sheriff or the county, and they dispatch someone to clear the tree off.
Within the Catholic Church this principle is also followed. Over one billion Catholics exist on the planet. The Pope neither can nor should try to micromanage them. Instead, he relies on his bishops, each of whom are over a geographical region, and these bishops rely on their priests, who are over one particular parish or church (typically), and the priests rely on their parishioners (lay people, regular Joes) to do a lot of the necessary tasks to keep the church running, to organize things, and so on.
Hence what appears to be super-centralized is actually in practice heavily decentralized. The Pope has no idea what's going on at any moment in time at the billions of places around the world where Catholics are living their Faith. He is instead a touchstone, the principle of unity within the Church, so that it remains one in the truth.
More on the oneness of truth a little later.
Anarchic vs. Hierarchical
Bitcoin is associated with anarcho-capitalists, and anarchy means "no ruler," no central "head" that rules over the whole thing.
The Catholic Church is hierarchical, so it seems to contradict Bitcoin's design.
Ah, but while Bitcoin has no central ruler, all Bitcoin nodes run the same code, from the same codebase, with the same consensus algorithm.
This is very strict. If Bitcoin nodes each decided to run their own customized code that diverged from the one, central code, then they would break the network, cause a hard fork, or some other catastrophic problem.
Truth is one, and in the Bitcoin world, that means running the same, single codebase, all having a copy of the one blockchain as the source of truth, and following the same consensus algorithm to enforce the truth.
This is similar to the Catholic Church, who follows Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
You can only have unity within the truth. If you all diverge and believe and practice different teachings, each claiming yours to be true, you will fragment from one another, break off from worshipping together, and the result will be catastrophic.
In fact, when people have broken from the Catholic Church and claimed that they had discovered the real truth, those created schisms from the Church. For instance, this is what all Protestant denominations have done.
These schisms are akin to deliberate hard forks of Bitcoin, most infamously the thousands of altcoins that now pollute the space.
Altcoin inventors copy the Bitcoin codebase, change various parameters and algorithms, then start running their new codebases that immediately fork off the Bitcoin network. They've changed the truth and made up their own new "truth," but for Bitcoiners we know immediately that they are not following the single truth of the Bitcoin code but have gone their own way and made something that is in effect, false in the light of Bitcoin.
That said, Bitcoin doesn't stop these people from forking the code and making their own altcoin, nor does the Catholic Church stop people from breaking in schism from the Church. People are free to do so if they wish.
The Catholic Church does warn such people, if she knows about them, that what they are doing is dangerous, immoral, and puts their souls at eternal risk of hell, because they are breaking from God's divinely revealed truth and substituting their own opinion for it instead.
Here Bitcoin and the Catholic Church do differ. Bitcoin is a man-made thing. Satoshi could have set the maximum number of Bitcoin to be 20 million, or 41 million, or many other numbers. The Proof-of-Work algorithm could have been a different one. And so on.
But the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ and so has divine origin, and its teachings are not man-made, nor are they arbitrary like the particular number chosen as the maximum total supply of Bitcoin. So when a Catholic rejects the Church, he puts his soul in jeopardy. When a Bitcoiner leaves Bitcoin for an altcoin, he is perhaps making an imprudent practical decision, even one with moral consequences, but he is not necessarily endangering his soul.
Universality
Catholic means universal, meaning that Jesus Christ and the Catholic Faith are for all people, over all the earth, for all time.
Similarly, Bitcoin has a goal of being universal sound money. It can be sent anywhere in the world, between any two people.
A Bitcoiner wants to be able to go to any country and exchange value for goods and services using Bitcoin. Similarly, Catholics can go to any Catholic church in the world, go to Mass, and experience the same universal liturgy. This universality was even more apparent when the Church used Latin for all Masses, and not the vernacular.
Undermine Authority?
Some might object that Bitcoin was meant to undermine authorities and power like the Catholic Church.
Not really though. Bitcoin was meant to provide sound money to people to undermine the vicious, debt-based fiat currency system that steals from people.
It was not meant to undermine organizations that promote the truth, which the Catholic Church does par excellence.
Bitcoin is sound, honest money, which the Catholic Church fully supports. In fact, Catholic doctrine condemns usury and much of the current debt-based system immorally exploits people through usurious practices.
It is true that some Catholic prelates have supported or do support various globalist agendas, but the Catholic Church herself does not, and her teachings run counter to the globalists' ideologies.
Freedom!
Bitcoin is voluntary, is about freedom, which the Catholic Church also represents.
How so?
I found a great explanation of this by Eric Sammons, a fellow Catholic, on a now-defunct blog post that I managed to extract from the Wayback machine:
"As Catholics, we believe God has given each human person free will. The human soul, made in the image of God, has a mind and a will. The mind thinks and the will chooses. This ability of the will to choose presumes it is free, for if the will had no freedom, how could it choose? The human will freely makes countless choices each day, including the most important choice: whether to serve God or self. Without freedom, we cannot love.
"Yes, the Catholic Church is a centralized organization, but more importantly, it is a voluntary organization. Each adult who is a practicing Catholic chooses to be so. At any time, he could choose to leave the Church and reject its teachings. Each day as a Catholic is a day chosen (even if subconsciously) to be a Catholic. (Children of course don’t completely choose to be Catholic, but as they grow up, they make the choice of their religion for themselves.) The centralized nature of the Church isn’t forced upon its members; they choose to belong to it knowing this structure.
"The voluntary nature of Church membership is a fundamental aspect of its mission. For Christ did not come to force people to follow him, but to choose to follow him, freely and out of love. As St. Paul wrote, “For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another” (Gal 5:13).
"How is this related to cryptocurrencies? All cryptocurrencies are based on the concept of voluntary participation, of freedom. A currency like Bitcoin isn’t backed by any government, which means it’s also not forced upon a country by a government, either. Look at a country like Venezuela: it has destroyed the value of its currency due to misguided and corrupt government economic policies. Yet the Venezuelan people are forced to continue to use this worthless money. Is this freedom?
"A cryptocurrency, on the other hand, must be voluntarily accepted by its users. In fact, its entire value is determined by the free choices of people to either use it or not use it. The lack of a centralized human authority to force a value upon it is in keeping with the proper understanding of the human person and free will. It applies the concept of freedom to money itself."
So should Bitcoiners become Catholic?
Yes they should.
But I don't expect a mass conversion from this blog post alone. Conversion takes time, as God patiently gives grace to people and allows them the free will to choose to accept it or not, over the course of their lives.
Hopefully though this post has shown that the prima facie contradictions between Bitcoin and the Catholic Church are only skin deep.
