So if Bitcoin isn’t an investment, what is it? To be clear, we aren’t giving investment advice — in fact, we aren’t even talking about investing, but rather suggesting that the church return to the practice of saving.
Sadly, most people don’t currently think about Bitcoin in the context of saving, because it falls into the category of “crypto,” and this space is riddled with scams, rug-pulls, and get-rich-quick schemes that play on the heart of speculators and gamblers. 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 Christians, we wholeheartedly agree that foolish speculation, getting rich quick, and other high time-preference or live-for-the-moment 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 — which I’ll explain in just a minute.
The intention of the heart
On the heart, the author of Hebrews writes:
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
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:
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
Saving vs. the rich fool
Jesus elaborates on this idea in the parable of the rich fool. 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 is confronted by God:
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, Paul adds a warning of his own:
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 — rather, we should be rich toward God.
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. Consider Joseph’s counsel to Pharaoh:
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. He stores up because he trusts in the LORD and his purposes. This is explained later, 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 outward behavior as the rich fool, but with a completely different intention of the heart — and that makes all the difference. So to summarize, we aren’t asking your church to approach Bitcoin as a speculative investment to hastily gain wealth. Instead, we’re encouraging you to think of Bitcoin as a long-term savings vehicle that can preserve capital for rainy days and kingdom building.
Time preference
With this in mind, 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 — 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. If your church is struggling just to 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.
Volatility isn’t risk
In the grand scheme of things, Bitcoin is still very new in the world of financial assets. 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. To put it another way, if you take the total amount of Bitcoin multiplied by the price — which at the time of this recording is about two trillion dollars — Bitcoin barely makes a dent compared to the hundreds of trillions in value currently stored, or saved, in bonds, real estate, and other assets like gold.
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 puddle, the ripples can cause quite a disturbance, but in the ocean, they are hardly noticeable. No one is denying that Bitcoin is volatile, but as the price increases, it will reach a higher and higher market capitalization — meaning the same inflows and outflows that used to cause large fluctuations 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 it is able to wait for years, or even decades, to use capital — the short-term volatility is irrelevant, because it isn’t taking the risk that it may need to spend some of its savings in the next week or month when the price happens to be down.
To go a little further on risk: we aren’t asking your church to take a chance on a brand-new idea with no track record. Asking your church to consider Bitcoin in 2025 is completely different than in 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 Strategy 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 the United States, with discussion of establishing a national Bitcoin reserve. Just a few years ago, in the bear market of 2022, any one of these things would have been unthinkable, as the discussion was more about countries like China banning Bitcoin and how the industry was full of scammers like Sam Bankman-Fried at FTX.
Adopting a Bitcoin standard during a bear market like that can be brutal, and it can give your church a skewed view of risk. For a more reasoned take, I think it’s helpful to look at Saifedean Ammous’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 toward 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 are 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, Bitcoin: There Is No Second Best. And if you’re looking for an alternate take on volatility, see Saylor’s presentation to the global financial institution Cantor Fitzgerald, where he argues that while conventional wisdom says to run away from volatility, volatility is actually vitality.
A lower time preference
So in conclusion, what we’re really asking your church to consider is prudently saving — and in the process, working toward 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.
It has been said 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 — not simply working for civilization for civilization’s sake, but for the sake of fulfilling the Great Commission and seeing God’s kingdom come. We’ll unpack these ideas in the next video.