So far we’ve covered finding the right person and understanding where they are coming from, giving them a reason to care that makes sense for your church, and delivering your message in a humble, gracious, patient, and above all, loving way.
Next, we’re going to talk about what you are really asking your church to do, but first we need to be clear about what you aren’t saying.
That is, you’re not giving investment advice. In fact, you’re not even talking about investing, but rather suggesting that the church return to the practice of saving.
It’s very important to establish this point early on in your conversation because most people don’t currently think about Bitcoin in the context of saving.
At best, most people consider Bitcoin to be a speculative investment on a risky and volatile asset where the only reason to get involved is to get rich quick. At worst, many view Bitcoin as throwing money away on a collective hallucination that is backed by nothing and destined to go the way of tulip mania.
Of course, as Bitcoiners, we actually whole-heartedly agree that foolish speculation, getting rich quick, and other high time preference behaviors are not only counterproductive, but also unbiblical.
Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it.
Proverbs 13:11
So how is it that Bitcoin is not these things? To understand you first need to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart, and then take a closer look at time preference, volatility, and risk.
Discerning the intentions of the heart
On the heart, Hebrews 4:12 says:
For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
Hebrews 4:12
So in other words, man is fickle, but we can stand fast on the word of the Lord and use it to discern the intentions of our hearts, and in the case of money, the Bible actually has quite a bit to say.
For example, Jesus says in Matthew 6:24:
No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
Matthew 6:24
Jesus elaborates on this idea in the parable of the rich fool in Luke chapter 12. The parable shows us a rich man who has saved so much that he has to tear down his storehouses and build bigger ones to fit all his stuff. But then he’s confronted by God in verses 20–21, who says:
Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.
Luke 12:20-21
Later on, in 1 Timothy 6:10, Paul says:
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.
1 Timothy 6:10
So the Bible makes it pretty clear that the intention of our hearts cannot be to love, serve, and put our trust in money over God, but that we should be rich towards God.
Saving up for a rainy day
At the same time, the Bible expects us to be prudent and wise with our money, especially when it comes to saving up for a rainy day.
Let Pharaoh proceed to appoint overseers over the land and take one-fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt during the seven plentiful years. And let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming and store up grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it.
Genesis 41:34–35
Here we see Joseph directing Pharaoh to store up mass quantities of food for the coming famine, but not because he is like the rich fool and trusts in himself, but because he trusts in the LORD and his purposes. This is explained later in Genesis 50:20, when Joseph says to his brothers:
As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.
Genesis 50:20
In the end, we see Joseph acting with the same behavior as the rich fool, but with a completely different intention of the heart, and this makes all the difference.
So to summarize, you aren’t asking your church to approach Bitcoin as a speculative investment to hastily gain wealth. Instead, you are encouraging them to think of Bitcoin as a long-term savings vehicle that can preserve capital for rainy days and kingdom building.
Time preference, volatility, and risk
Once you’ve established this context, it’s time to discuss time preference, volatility, and risk.
Time preference is a key concept in Austrian economics, and it’s just a fancy way of saying how much you want or need to spend money on something now, or how willing you are to wait. Living 100% in the moment means you have a very high time preference, or that you value having things right now very highly.
Having a high time preference is commonly associated with gratifying carnal desires or living a hedonistic or materialistic lifestyle, but it doesn’t always have to be viewed negatively. For example, all humans need food and shelter, and if you have neither, you will have a very high time preference when it comes to securing these basic necessities for yourself, for your family, and by extension, for your church.
As we talked about in a previous video, if your church is struggling to just pay rent, it is by definition in a higher time preference situation, and there isn’t necessarily anything wrong or bad about that — it just means it may not be the right time for Bitcoin.
Conversely, if your church is in a low time preference situation, meaning it is more willing or able to delay using its resources, it is in a much safer position to start saving in Bitcoin. Let me explain.
In the grand scheme of things, Bitcoin is still very new in the world of financial assets, and while it can appear to be very valuable relative to where it was even just a few years ago, it actually has a tiny market capitalization compared to the total addressable market for its store of value use case.
When most people think about storing value, or saving, they think about bonds, real estate, or maybe gold. Collectively, these asset classes currently represent hundreds of trillions of dollars of value. By comparison, at the time of this recording in late 2024, Bitcoin stores just under two trillion dollars of value — or to put it another way, less than 1% of all the value that is currently being stored or saved in the world.
Because of this, Bitcoin is still quite volatile by comparison, and it appears even more volatile the further back you look, when it had an even smaller market cap. Just like small cap stocks, the price of Bitcoin can fluctuate quite dramatically with a relatively small amount of capital flowing into or out of the market.
Think about the ripples caused by throwing a pebble into a small puddle versus the ocean. In the case of the puddle, the ripples can cause quite a disturbance, but in the case of the ocean, the ripples are hardly noticeable. No one is denying that Bitcoin is volatile, but as the price of Bitcoin increases, it will reach a higher and higher market capitalization, meaning that the same inflows and outflows that used to cause large fluctuations in price will barely be noticeable in the future.
In the meantime, volatility should be expected, but volatility is not the same thing as risk. If your church has a low enough time preference, meaning they are able to wait for years, or even decades, to use capital, the short-term volatility is irrelevant because they aren’t taking the risk that they may need to spend some of their savings in the next week or month when the price happens to be down.
And to go a little bit further on risk, you aren’t asking your church to take a risk on a brand new idea with no track record. Asking your church to consider Bitcoin in 2024 is completely different than 2014. Yes, the price is much higher, but with that price comes a much longer history of adoption and validation, which means much less risk.
At the time of this recording we have Wall Street adopting it with the launch of the ETFs, we have corporations like MicroStrategy adding it to their balance sheets and others like Microsoft considering it, and we even have nation state adoption in places like El Salvador and possibly even the United States, with the discussion of establishing a national Bitcoin reserve.
Just a few years ago any one of these things would have been unthinkable, as the discussion was more about countries like China banning Bitcoin, and how the industry is full of scammers like Sam Bankman-Fried at FTX. As Bitcoin was crashing in 2022, Peter Zeihan famously predicted on the Joe Rogan Podcast that the price would actually go negative. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but adopting a Bitcoin standard during a bear market like 2022 can be brutal and cause your church to have a skewed view of risk. Timing, the perception of risk, and handling associated objections are all important issues that we will cover in the coming videos.
Saving in the good with the least risk
To conclude our discussion of risk, I think it is helpful to look at Saifedean’s comparison of saving and investing from his book, Principles of Economics. He says:
Hedging against uncertainty is one of the main functions of money, and it is the reason that people prefer to hold some money rather than holding capital goods, even though the latter produce a yield whereas the former does not. Investments are less salable and involve entrepreneurial risk. Money, at least in a free market, is the good with the most salability and least risk; it is the good that can always be converted to other goods with the smallest loss of its economic value.
Saifedean Ammous, Principles of Economics
Living in a world of constantly inflating fiat currency has conditioned everyone to gravitate towards riskier and riskier investments, while at the same time viewing those investments as savings by rationalizing and discounting the risks. Sadly, in most cases, the returns on these investments is really just inflation masquerading as profits.
Counterintuitively, Bitcoin is not the next step in this constant quest to find better returns, but rather a return to saving in the market-good that has the most salability and the least amount of risk.
For more details on holding Bitcoin versus capital goods, check out Michael Saylor’s talk called Bitcoin: There Is No Second Best. And if you’re looking for an alternate take on volatility, check out Saylor’s presentation to the global financial institution Cantor Fitzgerald, where he says that while conventional wisdom is to run away from volatility, volatility is actually vitality.
Lowering time preference for the kingdom
So in conclusion, what you are really asking your church to do is to prudently save, and in the process, work towards having a lower time preference, both to prepare for a rainy day in the short-run and to do greater things for God’s kingdom in the long-run.
In his book, Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe says that the lowering of time preference initiates the process of civilization. This may be true, but as Christians we aim to extend that even further by not simply working for civilization for civilization’s sake, but for the sake of fulfilling the great commission and seeing God’s kingdom come.
Next, we’ll turn to timing — getting it right without trying to time the market.