After one year of writing Kingdom Bitcoin, I have become less interested in predicting what Bitcoin’s price might do next and more interested in asking what money, technology, freedom, wealth, and stewardship are actually for. This six-part anniversary series looks back at the convictions that survived the writing, sharpened through Scripture, history, markets, technology, and ordinary household life. Some ideas became stronger, others became more disciplined, and a few changed entirely. What remains is a clearer hierarchy: God first, truth before narrative, stewardship before speculation, and technology beneath all of it.
Jesus ended the Sermon on the Mount with two builders. One built his house on rock, the other on sand, and for a while both houses apparently looked like houses. Then the rain came, the streams rose, the winds blew, and suddenly the difference underneath became more important than everything visible above. Jesus said the first house “did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.” The storm did not create the weakness. It revealed the architecture that had been there all along.
That story has increasingly shaped the way I think about Bitcoin. When I first read the white paper in December 2013, I was fascinated by the idea of digital money operating without a traditional financial intermediary. After a year of writing Kingdom Bitcoin, I am even more interested in the machinery beneath that idea. The deeper I went into Bitcoin’s architecture, the less interested I became in slogans. “Nobody controls Bitcoin” sounds wonderful on a T-shirt, but reality is more interesting.
Bitcoin works because different participants possess different powers, and those powers are constrained by rules that others can independently verify. Miners perform proof of work and propose blocks. Nodes examine those blocks and reject anything that violates the rules they enforce. Developers can propose software, but they cannot force people to run it. Wallets, exchanges, custodians, businesses, and users all influence how Bitcoin is actually used, yet none of them individually possesses a magic red button labeled CONTROL BITCOIN.
That is why proof of work matters so much. The work required to compete for the next block is intentionally expensive, while checking whether that work and the resulting block are valid is comparatively inexpensive. That is an extraordinary architectural principle: work should be expensive to fake and truth inexpensive to verify. Bitcoin does not ask every participant to trust that miners behaved correctly. It gives nodes a way to check.
The ledger operates on the same principle. Transactions are recorded publicly, Bitcoin’s issuance follows rules that can be inspected, and the twenty-one-million limit does not depend on everyone simply taking a central banker’s word for it. Halvings reduce new issuance according to a known schedule, and individual users can run software that independently verifies whether the rules have been followed. Bitcoin is therefore not truly “trustless.” I think a better description is trust-minimized and verification-maximized.
We still trust things. We trust software we did not personally write, hardware we did not personally manufacture, and our own ability not to lose twelve or twenty-four words at exactly the wrong moment. Some people trust custodians, exchanges, family members, or multisignature partners. Bitcoin does not eliminate human trust from human life. It simply keeps asking a better question: Can this claim be verified rather than merely believed?
Benjamin Franklin understood something about imperfect systems near the end of the Constitutional Convention. He acknowledged that he did not approve of every part of the Constitution, yet he also recognized that expecting perfect wisdom from any gathering of human beings was unrealistic. The Founders built checks, balances, competing authorities, and processes because they knew the republic would be governed by people rather than angels. Bitcoin is not the Constitution, but both architectures begin from a sober premise: a durable system should not require perfect people to remain durable.
For the household, this matters more than most Bitcoin jargon ever will. You do not need to become a cryptographer, but you should understand enough to know what your wallet is doing, why your private key matters, what miners actually do, why nodes matter, and where your custody trust resides. Can you explain Bitcoin to your spouse without using “blockchain” seventeen times? Can you explain scarcity to your child without pulling up a candlestick chart? If not, perhaps the next step is education rather than another purchase.
Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:21, “Test everything; hold fast what is good.” Christianity is not a command to become gullible, and neither should our approach to technology be. Jesus Christ is worthy of ultimate trust because He is Truth. Human systems should be inspected, challenged, tested, and improved because human beings remain fallible.
After a year, that may be one of the deepest things Bitcoin has taught me. The ledger is not powerful because everyone agrees with everyone. It is powerful because everyone can check.
And freedom built on verification is much stronger than freedom built on hope that the person in charge behaves.
Kingdom Principle 👑
Durable freedom rests on architecture that people can understand, inspect, and verify.
Bitcoin’s strength is not that nobody controls anything. Its strength is that authority is divided, rules are explicit, and important claims can be independently checked. That does not remove trust from human life, but it can reduce the amount of blind trust a system requires.
The Christian lesson runs deeper. Scripture continually calls us to discernment rather than gullibility. We should test what we are told, understand what we steward, and place ultimate trust only where ultimate trust belongs. The deeper I have gone into Bitcoin’s machinery, the more convinced I have become that verification matters, but Jesus Christ remains the only foundation strong enough to carry everything else.
Prayer 🙏
Heavenly Father, thank You for giving humanity the ability to build, reason, test, create, and understand. Give us wisdom to examine the systems we use without becoming cynical, and humility to recognize that no technology designed by human beings is perfect. Teach us to pursue truth rather than slogans and understanding rather than blind dependence.
Holy Spirit, guide our households as we learn to steward new technologies responsibly. Help us teach our children not merely what to trust, but how to discern, verify, and remain anchored in truth. Keep Jesus Christ as the rock beneath every financial system, technological tool, ambition, and decision we make. In Jesus’ name, Amen. 🙏📖🏠🪨⚙️₿🔍🔐🕊️👑