The Intellectual Trap: Bitcoiners and the Christian Faith

Anonymous 14th-century Englishman suggests a humble path

Bitcoiner Blake gifted me “The Cloud of Unknowing” last fall.

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Bitcoiners new to Christianity risk wreckage if they don’t humble themselves on religion, even if the Lord 500x’s their savings for ending the plague of unbacked fiat currency.

I played page roulette last night with “The Cloud of Unknowing.” Landed here:

Those who rely more on their own natural intelligence and human learning than on the common doctrine and guidance of the Church are deceived.

That was me.

The Bitcoin lens fails today

There are still others who … fall victim to their pride, intellectual curiosity, and scholarly knowledge when they reject the common doctrine and guidance of the Church.

I started the Christian Bitcoiner thing in 2021. Lot of Protestantism. Eastern Orthodox. Dunks on woke centralized Catholic Church. I thought our Bitcoin Twitter hive mind would lead me by a smooth path. That lens worked so well on money, food…

Ignorance has consequences

It wasn’t that I rejected the common doctrine and guidance of the Church. However, in hindsight, I definitely didn’t know what it was. I didn’t find it because none of my in-group Bitcoiners were about it.

Nonetheless,

They were never rooted in that humble, blind experience of contemplative love and the goodness of life accompanying it. Thus they are vulnerable to a pseudo-experience designed and directed by their spiritual enemy. They go so far as to rise up and blaspheme the saints, the sacraments, and the ordinances of Holy Church.

So I fell down some traps:

• Confusion about sexual morality and acting stupid in bar settings. I damaged my own purity and the purity of someone else’s future wife.

• Confusion about purpose of marriage. I delayed pursuing the sacrament and remain without its gifts.

• Wasting time focusing on one kind of interpretation of scripture and letting it influence actions disproportionately. So I was a caricature of a human — robotic, predictable, thinking, lacking life.

• Not ideal role model for family and friends. Wasting gift of intelligence, their lives impacted because I wasn’t being a leader.

• Missing the supernatural benefits of the Eucharist. Confession. Hard to explain how big this is without experiencing it.

In Confessions, Saint Augustine discusses his regrets for following the Manichaean religion and believing in astrology. He writes about his friend Nebridius’s role in helping to persuade him that astrology was not only incorrect but evil, and Saint Ambrose’s role in his conversion to Christianity. He shows intense sorrow for his sexual sins and writes on the importance of sexual morality.

Pain in private

The author of the book is a fourteenth-century anonymous Englishman mystic. He continues:

Sensual-living men of the world who feel that the Church’s requirements for the proper amendment of their lives are too burdensome quickly and easily follow after these heretics and fiercely support them.

Now I really believe that anyone who will not tread the arduous way to heaven will run the easy way to hell, as we shall each learn on the last day. For I am convinced that if we could see these heretics and their followers now, as clearly as we shall see them on Judgment Day, we would realize that besides their open presumption in denying the truth, they are burdened with great and terrible sins committed in their private lives. It is said of them that for all the false virtue they display in public, in private their lives are full of evil lust. In all truth they may be called the disciples of Anti-Christ.

It is early

Things move fast in crypto to Bitcoin-only conversions. Faith life’s slower. We’re too early on in our collective truth journey to grasp the Complete Fullness of Truth in the Catholic Church. If you’re dabbling in:

• Protestantism

• Orthodoxy

• Catholic without the Sacraments

You may be in your altcoin era.

So what do we do?

To rely more on the common doctrine and guidance of the Church instead of our own natural intelligence and human learning I started with two action steps:

• Go to Sunday Mass every week. Find an orthodox one. Traditional Latin Mass parishes are a decent proxy for this, but I’ve also found orthodox teaching in modern Catholic movements. Talk to the priests, whose first duty is “to preach the Faith by word and example."

• Go to the Catechism when you have a question. It has answers. I didn’t know this existed. It will give you clarity on common doctrine and guidance.

People are waking up

We’ve also got some momentum. There weren’t many Bitcoiner Catholics publishing before. But now:

• Pierre’s public with his conversion and running a 1K-follower Twitter apostolate.

• A Bitcoin and Catholic Social Teaching retreat is happening this November in El Salvador.

• Catholic academic Jörg Guido Hülsmann headlining the Thank God for Bitcoin conference in Nashville last week.

• Bitcoin Catholic Devin Rose creating more faith content directed at Bitcoiners.

• Found some other Bitcoiner friends that converted over the past years I must reconnect with.

Finding balance

For new Christian Bitcoiners, our skepticism can be a liability, leaving us vulnerable to fiat faith. It can make it difficult to build relationships and collaborate with others. It can also lead to conflict and resentment.

The key is to find a balance, and that’s found in the common doctrine and guidance of the Church. Through this I learned how to channel my disagreeableness in a constructive way, which is vital for the success of our mission.