Self fulfilling prophecy or not, Christianity–or faith in general–have influenced the society we live in second only to water. In that light, this post is about the topical comparison between predictions made by Christianity and the popular craze about a new currency called BitCoin. 

Bitcoin was first proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 in a paper submitted to  mailing list. However, it turns out Satoshi was an anonymous (not the hacker group) name offered by one or more individuals. To understand Bitcoin is like asking to explain open source, every process is readily accessible but every action is perfectly hidden. FastCompany and Forbes have both attempted to locate the original curators as they have slowly lost touch with the community. FastCompany assumes that due to the 72 hour gap between the filing of a patent by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008 that it is likely them–all three have denied this.

You need to know three things about Bitcoin before you formulate your opinion: 

1. It’s still commonly used by hackers, criminals, and hariminals (hacker-criminals). Wikileaks accepted it as a form of donation, 1000 merchants use it world-wide, and beyond Mt. Gox the banking infrastructure is non-existent
2. In it’s basic form you receive a private key and public key which you trade with another individual…in this sense, Bitcoin could be duplicated, or halved, or millionthed, but the private key cannot.
3. The explosion of interest around Bitcoin is largely due to the United States Treasury report released on March 18 2013.

In it’s basic form you receive a private key and public key which you trade with another individual…in this sense, Bitcoin could be duplicated, or halved, or millionthed, but the private key cannot.

(I vowed to not let me blog get flooded by pictures but this one so clearly outlined the concept for me I succumbed). 

Now lets answer my disruptive title’s question: Is Bitcoin the One World Currency inferred in the Bible? I believe that it is not. However, I think there are interesting correlations to the currency and the prophetic offerings of Revelation. 

A. Revelation, a book in the Christian Bible written by the Apostle John claims that the “beast” will provide a global mark which will be necessary to conduct all financial transactions and ultimately allowing the enforcement of jurisdiction. Bitcoin is at it’s root a private number issued to you that is too long for you to remember but unique enough to never be duplicated in natured. This identification the crux of the Bitcoin network. 

B. Bitcoin miners (banks) and currency exchanges are irrelevant, it is only as valuable as the people who use it, in this way (as is suggested in Revelation) the Bitcoin network stands above government authorities because use is its only value. To understand this look at the evaluation of the value of currency. The first evaluation was the wide adoption of the Denarius coin used in Roman times backed by Ceasar. However as mining operations from the Africa conquests increased the gold/silver supply the currency began to lose its value. The critical weakness of the currency was the the tie to resource scarcity–gold and silver while difficult to obtain are not impossible to duplicate.

The Dutch East Indies trading company was the first private conglomerate to begin issuing it’s own currency of copper coins so that trade cities could pay for goods without the necessary gold or silver coinage commonly used–outside of the pound. The company issued private writs which validated shipments of coins as transactable. The copper coins backed by the company were of course duplicatable, the writ was not. Even after the collapse of the trading company some 

Finally we see the latest evolution of currency with the US Treasury backed USD. This value is attributed to an unknown level that the treasury issues based on its own determination of market conditions. As we have seen, this does not create ultimate faith in the currency.

With all of these things in mind, the underlying idea behind currency is the exchange of value: essentially scarcity. Bitcoin is not only finite (there will only be 21 million coins issued ever due to the encryption process) but in a sense Bitcoin is the process of two currencies, not a currency itself–a finite pool of scarcity in the 21 million coins and a perfectly scarce private key for each individual. 

C. Ok, enough of the finance talk. My last thought for you is this, if I were to describe all religions without any unique classifications or keywords unique to the religion I think the common philosophy is a belief in a greater good. I think people have shifted this common good to an assumption that with more money, you have greater good. In this sense we can assume that a one world religion around the faith in money may already be here. 



Best,
Patrick McConlogue

http://thnkr.quora.com/Is-BitCoin-The-Bibles-One-World-Currency