The Believers

How Bitcoin culture mistook a monetary protocol for a moral order

Donald Trump stood on the stage at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville in July 2024 and told the audience that Bitcoin stood for “freedom, sovereignty and independence from government coercion and control.” Later in the same speech, he promised that “the rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry.” There was the proposition, delivered in the candidate’s own words: independence from government, secured by getting the right people into government to write the rules. He also offered a piece of investment advice: “Never sell your Bitcoin.” The conference has preserved the performance.

That last line was a nod to HODLing, the community’s term for holding on to bitcoin rather than selling through the market’s swings. The name comes from a 2013 forum post titled “I AM HODLING”, whose author admitted he was a bad trader and would keep his bitcoin rather than try to outsmart the market. A misspelling became a maxim. In Nashville, Trump was echoing that maxim back to its believers: keep holding, and put someone who understands you in power. The appeal joined a financial commitment to a political one.

I was not there. I had boycotted the conference because Bitcoin Magazine had invited Trump and its head was fundraising for him. I encouraged some of my colleagues to stay away, too. They went. Whatever scruples I thought the occasion required, they did not share them. They had a choice about where to stand. They made it.

The invitation was part of an organized political effort. Bitcoin Magazine‘s announcement identified BTC Inc. as the owner of both the magazine and the conference. Its chief executive, David Bailey, had pledged to raise money and mobilize voters for Trump; a fundraiser was scheduled alongside the Nashville appearance, according to contemporaneous reporting. A magazine, a conference, a constituency, a candidate. Those are ordinary instruments of political power, however extraordinary the claims made about the technology around which they were assembled.

Trump’s record was available. The January 6 committee’s findings described his pressure on Mike Pence to refuse electoral votes and his oversight of an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates. My objection did not depend on predicting what he might someday become. People who claimed to care about freedom were welcoming a man whose attempt to overturn an election was already documented. A favorable position on Bitcoin did not make that history irrelevant. It made the willingness to overlook it more revealing.

I had spent years inside this world. These were people I worked alongside, people whose ambitions I understood, people with whom I had shared the belief that we might build something useful. My objection was personal in the sense that it involved an obligation to people and institutions I knew. I was asking colleagues to exercise judgment about what they were helping legitimate. The fact that the candidate was promising things they wanted did not relieve them of that obligation.

What interests me now is how a culture organized around distrust became so accommodating toward power that offered to favor it. The answer requires more than pointing out hypocrisy. Hypocrisy would mean a recognizable principle had been set aside for convenience. I think something more consequential happened: Bitcoin’s success became a moral principle of its own, capable of deciding which other principles could wait.

Once you arrive there, the political character of the person promoting Bitcoin becomes negotiable, while his usefulness to Bitcoin supplies the reason to keep negotiating. The person who objects can be asked why he is obstructing progress rather than what he thinks the progress is costing.

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When Square announced the business that became TBD in 2021, I was named to lead it. At the time, I described technology, from the printing press to the internet to Bitcoin, as a means of distributing power and unleashing human potential. I want that statement in the record here. I was a participant in the promise I am examining, and I owe readers something more demanding than the retrospective fiction that I always saw through everyone.

My former position does not make my present judgment automatically correct. Readers should ask what I believed, what I helped build, and where my account relies on an experience they cannot independently inspect. Insider status is useful when it supplies knowledge and becomes dangerous when it is offered as a reason to stop asking questions. I have no interest in replacing the authority of their credentials with an exemption for mine. The argument has to survive without either exemption.

There are real problems behind the promise. A person can be excluded from banking. An intermediary can refuse a transaction. A government can use control over financial institutions against its opponents. Alex Gladstein’s account of Bitcoin’s use by dissidents describes people trying to get money past those obstacles. Whether a particular implementation works, what risks it creates, and how it compares with alternatives are serious questions. They deserve answers more precise than either a marketing slogan or a sneer.

The original technical proposal was more precise. Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 announcement described “a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.” The white paper explained a mechanism for addressing double-spending without relying on a financial intermediary, under specified assumptions about the network. Its achievement, whatever judgment one reaches about its applications, was a technical proposal about transactions. It did not contain a demonstration of which political regime was legitimate or which kind of person deserved to govern.

Nor was the project born without politics. Eric Hughes’s 1993 cypherpunk manifesto treated privacy as a social necessity and declared that “Cypherpunks write code.” Satoshi’s 2009 explanation criticized the trust placed in central banks not to debase currency. There is no need to manufacture an innocent, apolitical childhood for Bitcoin. The distinction that matters is between writing software informed by political commitments and claiming that the software has established those commitments as truth.

Software can enforce a rule without establishing that the rule is just. A transaction can satisfy a network’s requirements without becoming a good thing to do. No amount of technical precision eliminates that distinction. If you want a monetary system with particular properties, you can argue for those properties. You still have to explain what follows from them, whom they benefit, what they cost, and why your preferred trade-offs deserve public acceptance.

Even the history of Bitcoin’s rules contains people arguing. In 2017, the proposal known as BIP 148 sought a user-activated change in enforcement, while the organizers of SegWit2x eventually suspended their upgrade for lack of sufficient consensus. A later account commemorated August 1 as “Bitcoin Independence Day”. The struggle over a technical system had acquired a political history and a commemorative calendar.

There is nothing inherently ridiculous about a community remembering a consequential dispute. But the dispute should make it harder to forget the community. People maintain the software, select the versions they run, argue about changes, and decide what they recognize as legitimate. The algorithm does not descend into the room to settle the interpretation of its own authority. People do that, too.

At the Bitcoin conference in Miami in June 2021, Jack Dorsey described the network’s consensus as something that “always manages to do the right thing over time. It’s noble,” in his interview with Gladstein. I find that formulation more revealing than any cartoon of a speculator staring at a price chart. “The right thing” is a moral judgment. “Noble” describes a quality we ordinarily associate with character or conduct. Dorsey was praising a technical and social process in terms that endowed it with both.

Perhaps he meant only that the community tended to make good technical decisions. Even that judgment would require examining decisions and outcomes rather than treating consensus as its own warrant. Once the language expands into the right ordering of society, the missing work becomes enormous. People can agree and be wrong. They can preserve a system while using it badly. The fact that a procedure settles a disagreement tells us nothing, by itself, about whether the settlement deserves our allegiance.

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The reach of that authority becomes clearer when you read the literature that grew around it. In The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous connects monetary hardness to time preference, the willingness to defer consumption, and then connects time preference to civilization. The book extends the argument into artistic judgment: “It was hard money that financed Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos while easy money financed Miley Cyrus’s twerks.” That sentence appears in an actual book offered as an explanation of the monetary foundations of social life.

You can have an argument about inflation and incentives. You can have an argument about saving, uncertainty, investment, or the conditions under which people plan for the future. Ammous himself acknowledges other influences on time preference, including security of person and property, in the same book. But the causal distance between monetary arrangements and a judgment about Bach and Miley Cyrus requires considerably more work than the confidence of the sentence performs. A preference in music has been dressed as a finding about civilization.

The rhetorical advantage is obvious. If your cultural preferences are consequences of sound money, you no longer have to defend them merely as preferences. Your dislike of contemporary art can appear to be an understanding of economics. Your discomfort with social change can become evidence that you recognize the effects of monetary decay. A theory of money begins issuing certificates of seriousness to judgments imported from somewhere else.

Jimmy Song carries the argument into the household. In “Fixing the Incentives: The Fiat Treadmill Keeps Us From Storing Value,” he describes changes involving diet, drinking, games, marriage, children, and religion in the language of a Bitcoin-induced transformation. “Come for the returns, stay for the life change.” In “Fiat Debases Marriage,” he argues that the debasement of money contributed significantly to the debasement of marriage. The currency is now implicated in your domestic conduct.

And then there is the steak. In Bitcoin Well‘s account of the 2021 conference, the Saifedean Carnivore Dinner brought more than a hundred bitcoiners together at a steakhouse, where attendees received advance copies of Ammous’s The Fiat Standard. A meal, a community, and a book explaining what was wrong with the monetary order arrived together. The steak was something to eat, certainly. The event also gave a set of beliefs a social occasion at which to recognize itself.

Ammous has explained the connection himself. In an interview with Bitcoinist, he said understanding Bitcoin required escaping “government propaganda and Keynesian stupidity,” then extended the same account to nutrition: “It turns out it isn’t just modern economics that is full of garbage.” The person who has rejected the authorities on money is invited to recognize the same deception in food. Confidence travels between subjects on the strength of the believer’s identity, rather than through a fresh demonstration of expertise.

Bitcoin Magazine published an essay actually titled “Bitcoin Is the Steak of Money”, explaining the connection through a desire for food “as verifiably un-altered as bitcoin.” Within that account, meat and money share a vocabulary of purity, verification, and distrust. A preference for steak becomes evidence that you can see through the same corrupt world you escaped by buying Bitcoin. There is a considerable difference between enjoying a ribeye and believing that your ribeye demonstrates intellectual independence.

Nobody needs a theory of civilization to order dinner. The significance of the steak is that the doctrine reaches into an ordinary act and makes it an expression of belonging. You can eat the right food, hold the right asset, distrust the right experts, and recognize the people doing the same. Each choice can lend the others the comfort of familiarity. The person selling you a theory of money can become an authority on your body without having earned that authority in the relevant field.

Jeff Booth offers a more expansive and less austere destination. In “Finding Signal in a Noisy World,” Bitcoin is the “only thing that I have found” that will permit a transition to “planetary alignment and abundance.” His qualification matters, and so does the ambition. We have traveled from a system for electronic payments to a proposed condition for the alignment of the planet. The size of that claim should increase the burden of explanation, not reduce it.

A monetary preference becomes an account of why civilization flourishes, why art declines, why marriages fail, and how abundance will arrive. Technical vocabulary gives these claims a borrowed air of necessity. The person who questions the inference can then be treated as someone who does not understand the technology, even when the inference concerns something the technology has never established.

The code cannot tell you whether Bach is better than Miley Cyrus. It cannot tell you whether your marriage is good. These are absurd sentences to have to write. Their necessity tells you how far the argument has wandered.

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I know people personally who wish and hope for the collapse of the US dollar. They look forward to it as a great cleansing. I am describing people I know, not assigning a secret wish to everyone who owns Bitcoin. But I am also unwilling to soften what I have encountered into a harmless interest in monetary reform.

Predicting a collapse, preparing for one, and welcoming one are different moral positions. You might believe an institution is fragile and try to protect yourself. You might believe it is unjust and work to replace it. Hoping for its collapse introduces another question: what, exactly, are you hoping happens to the people whose lives depend on it? The fact that you expect a better system afterward does not answer that question. It makes your answer more urgent.

I think of this as fiat eschatology. The existing order is corrupt, its corruption explains the suffering and ugliness around us, and a decisive transition will permit a purified world to emerge. An investment thesis has acquired an account of the end of history. The prospective vindication of the believer becomes entangled with the destruction of the institutions the believer despises.

There is an early text for the monetary transition. In March 2014, Daniel Krawisz published “Hyperbitcoinization,” describing the possibility of Bitcoin-induced demonetization: an existing currency rapidly losing value as Bitcoin supplants it. He called this a voluntary transition from an inferior currency to a superior one and anticipated an improvement in productivity and wealth. He began with a possibility, not a dated prediction, and that distinction should survive criticism.

But the destination in Krawisz’s essay is striking. After a confusing transition, he writes, people will no longer be able to imagine how they lived under the previous system. Monetary displacement is given the shape of an awakening. Join that destination to the accounts of cultural decay and personal renewal, and the ingredients of an encompassing story are available: what went wrong, who understands it, how the break comes, and what redeemed life will look like.

Krawisz describes a possible transition and its expected benefits. The people I know go further: they welcome destruction as cleansing. I cannot attribute their convictions to his essay. But their hope raises the question his account leaves open: what becomes of the present when you judge it chiefly by the monetary future you expect to inherit?

The people living in that present cannot be reduced to obstacles in a transition. Suppose the collapse you anticipate made ordinary life harder for people who never had your opportunities, your technical knowledge, or your ability to take financial risks. Would their hardship count against your vision? Or would it be absorbed into the vision as the painful but necessary passage to something better? A doctrine that can convert every possible injury into evidence of historical necessity has escaped moral accountability.

The cleansing would need to be explained to someone whose wages no longer covered necessities, or whose savings no longer bought the security they were accumulated to provide. These are hypothetical consequences to consider, not a forecast of a particular monetary event. The point is to make the imagined transition answerable to a person. Telling her that she should have understood your thesis earlier would not discharge your responsibility for welcoming the outcome. It would reveal that the promise of universal liberation had quietly acquired an entrance requirement: she needed to agree with you in time.

The attraction is not difficult to understand. You can imagine yourself vindicated financially and intellectually at once. The people who dismissed you would have to admit that you saw what they could not. The institutions that frustrated you would lose their authority. Your investment would become proof of your judgment, and your judgment would become proof of your fitness for the order that followed.

I do not know how much of any particular person’s conviction comes from financial interest, resentment, sincere belief, or hope. Those motives can coexist, including within people who are telling the truth about their ideals. The danger lies in the permission the story supplies: if your asset’s triumph is humanity’s liberation, advancing the asset begins to look like a duty that can excuse an extraordinary range of compromises.

That is where the culture’s cult-like qualities become more than an insult. The all-explaining doctrine, the conversion testimony, the promised vindication, and the difficulty of separating criticism of the asset from hostility to the good life form a recognizable pattern. The deity, in my formulation, is a computer algorithm. I mean the authority assigned to it, not a claim about anyone’s literal religious observance.

Human beings supply the interpretations. Human beings decide which alliances serve the future. When those decisions go wrong, the algorithm remains available to be described as innocent, while the people who claimed to speak for its promise move on to the next opportunity.

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Bitcoin Beach began with a community, not a presidential decree. Its own history dates the experiment to 2019 and an anonymous bitcoin donation. Its account of the team includes Mike Peterson, Jorge Valenzuela, Roman Martinez, and Hirvin Palma, with community work that preceded the experiment. Salvadorans were participants in this history. They should not disappear into a story in which foreigners arrive carrying technology and everyone else waits to be transformed.

In Gladstein’s reporting, the donor wanted bitcoin to circulate locally rather than simply be converted into cash. The experiment involved ordinary transactions and community activity. Peterson also described going with Valenzuela, Martinez, and Miles Suter to pitch a national Bitcoin strategy to the tourism minister in early 2021. The bridge from local project to national ambition was a meeting involving identifiable people, not an inevitable stage in a protocol’s development.

In June 2021, Jack Mallers presented the adoption initiative at the Bitcoin conference while Nayib Bukele announced his intention by video. Strike‘s announcement celebrated the moment as a historic advance for Bitcoin. The law that followedrequired economic agents to accept bitcoin when offered, with an exception for those evidently lacking the technology. The national experiment in monetary freedom included compulsory acceptance.

That contradiction was available to anyone willing to read the statute. You cannot derive a merchant’s consent from a president’s enthusiasm. You cannot establish the freedom of a population by observing that its government adopted your preferred monetary instrument. If voluntariness was part of the good you promised, compulsion should have registered as a problem with the project itself, not merely an inconvenient detail to be subordinated to adoption.

Gladstein did register the problem. In a 2021 interview with El Faro, he said Bukele was dismantling democracy and called that antithetical to Bitcoin. He opposed Chivo, the state wallet, while maintaining a hope that Bitcoin could turn the ruler’s self-interest toward greater freedom. His criticism matters because it prevents the lazy account in which everyone associated with Bitcoin or human-rights advocacy endorsed the same political bargain.

It also leaves a substantive disagreement. What warrants the confidence that a monetary tool will bend political power toward freedom? A ruler may find a technology useful without accepting the moral obligations its advocates attach to it. If an advocate believes adoption will eventually discipline the ruler, the advocate owes the people living under that ruler an explanation of the mechanism, the timetable, and the conditions under which the prediction will be judged wrong.

There were people doing more than waiting for a mechanism to work. The Salvadoran government’s own report records Stacy Herbert as director of its National Bitcoin Office. In a 2024 interview, she described herself as “the keeper of the vision,” bringing others toward Bukele’s vision for the country, and connected “perfect money” with a new Renaissance. The promise of civilizational repair had acquired a government office.

Business infrastructure followed its own path. In May 2024, OCEAN announced a San Salvador hub, identified Jack Dorsey as a backer, quoted Herbert’s welcome, and proposed supporting communities including Bitcoin Beach. These are specific relationships: an investment, a business location, an official welcome, a proposed collaboration. They are not proof that every participant shared every political view. They do show why “Bitcoin” cannot be treated as though it acts in the world without organizations, money, personnel, or state relationships.

The legal arrangement changed, too. Amendments effective on April 30, 2025 made private acceptance voluntary, as the consolidated statute records. When the monetary ideal became a national project, choices about coercion and consent were made by people exercising political authority. The protocol did not decide those questions for them, and its existence did not absolve anyone from asking them.

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Michael Saylor gives the same expansion of authority a different institutional form. MicroStrategy‘s 2020 financial resultsdescribe a board-authorized Bitcoin investment and a treasury policy making Bitcoin its primary reserve asset. Here was a public company making a capital-allocation decision. Saylor described potential returns compared with cash and increased visibility for the company. Those are intelligible corporate considerations. They can be examined without invoking the fate of civilization.

His language soon supplied something larger. In September 2020, he called Bitcoin “a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth.” At the Atlas Society‘s 2022 gala, the account became an “economic machine based on a truth machine poised to emerge as a freedom machine.” He invoked saving civilization, realizing an Objectivist ideal, and the injunction “Fix the money, fix the world.”

The word “truth” is doing extraordinary work there. Agreement about a transaction history is made to sound like access to a general authority over human affairs. From truth comes freedom; from freedom comes civilizational rescue. Each step needs an argument of its own. Engineering vocabulary does not supply the missing steps, however fluently it is delivered or however wealthy the speaker becomes.

Saylor’s financial structure is worth explaining precisely because it is less mystical. Strategy finances a Bitcoin-heavy balance sheet through securities with different claims and risks. Its SEC-filed investor briefing distinguishes common equity, preferred equity, and debt, places common shareholders behind senior claims, and explains that owning its securities is not ownership of particular coins. A share in the company is a claim whose value depends partly on decisions made by other people within a corporate structure.

When a company can issue equity on sufficiently favorable terms and use the proceeds to acquire assets, existing shareholders may benefit under the relevant assumptions. Unfavorable issuance, a falling asset price, financing costs, and a shrinking valuation premium can change the outcome. Strategy‘s metric definitions and caveats address those dependencies and warn that its “BTC Yield” is not conventional investment income. The word “yield” does not make bitcoin sitting on a balance sheet pay a coupon.

Calling the whole arrangement a leveraged Bitcoin bet is a beginning, not an explanation. Debt is not preferred equity. A preferred shareholder’s position is not a common shareholder’s position. The company has to manage obligations, financing access, and investor expectations within that hierarchy, as its disclosures make clear. None of those distinctions vanishes because the underlying asset is promoted as an escape from the institutions that issue such instruments.

The memes deserve attention in that setting. A memorable image can make a complicated position feel simple enough to inhabit: you are participating in something powerful, historic, and misunderstood by lesser minds. Saylor’s cyber hornetssupply precisely that imagery. The corporate disclosures require a different kind of attention, one concerned with priorities, obligations, and circumstances in which apparently favorable measures can mislead. I am not claiming to have measured how much his imagery contributes to demand for the securities. I am asking what habits of judgment the imagery encourages beside a financial structure that requires careful discrimination.

A will to power need not announce itself as a desire to rule other people. It can appear as the ambition to make one’s description of the future so compelling that other people organize their decisions around it. The promise is especially potent when following it offers both enrichment and admission to the company of those who understood. The person issuing the promise acquires authority that extends beyond the argument he has actually demonstrated. Readers should be able to admire a successful decision without granting its author jurisdiction over the meaning of civilization.

In 2024, Saylor said “Bitcoin is the exit strategy,” rejecting the idea of selling the winner to buy losers. By July 2026, Strategy‘s results disclosed authority to sell Bitcoin for its dollar reserve, dividends and interest, and security repurchases, and reported sales used to fund some preferred dividends. There may be sound corporate reasons for such decisions. Their existence demonstrates why a slogan about holding cannot substitute for an account of corporate obligations.

Saylor has also revised the public doctrine. In “The Bitcoin Reformation,” published in August 2026, he criticizes an orthodoxy that becomes exclusive, universal, and immune to context. Governments and banks will not disappear, he says; self-custody is a right rather than a universal duty. Institutional integration is embraced. That development belongs in the account, even if it makes the polemic less convenient.

I welcome an argument that allows context back into the room. But it raises a question about the authority of the earlier certainty. Who decides when a principle is immutable and when it needs reform? If institutional accommodation becomes permissible when it serves an expanding financial structure, readers should examine the accommodation and the structure together. That is not proof of fraud, but it is a very good reason to stop mistaking the speaker’s command of a narrative for the narrative’s independence from his interests.

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Not everyone who supports Bitcoin accepts the whole cultural package. Nic Carter has explicitly rejected Bitcoin as a lifestyle, including the sentence “Bitcoin is not a steak dinner.” After the carnivore dinners and the theories of monetary purity, his need to say so is understandable. Lyn Alden’s analysis of Bitcoin’s security model treats its future security budget as a question involving unresolved risk. These are different kinds of argument from the proposition that sound money establishes a sound civilization.

So is the dissident’s case. A person trying to receive support under a repressive government does not have to endorse Ammous’s musical criticism, Song’s account of marriage, or Saylor’s civilizational rhetoric. Gladstein’s examples of dissident financing deserve examination on their own terms. If a tool helps someone do something worthwhile, that usefulness should survive the criticism of the culture assembled around it.

I was involved in the Bitcoin program around the Human Rights Foundation. I have come to regard its structural incentives with suspicion. I am not arguing that the people doing this work are consciously running a marketing operation. I think they believe their own bullshit. I think they have accepted the identification of Bitcoin’s advance with the advance of human freedom so completely that serving the former can feel like sufficient evidence of serving the latter. In that understanding, a donor’s interest in promoting Bitcoin need never register as a competing interest. It can look like another person’s commitment to the same cause.

The program’s own descriptions show how readily the purposes can sit together. Its Bitcoin Development Fund supports education, community-building, and “promoting Bitcoin’s use in repressive environments,” alongside technical development. In December 2022, it announced a $25,000 grant to Bitcoin Magazine Ukraine for meetups, the growth of Bitcoin communities, and the publication’s first print edition. The promotional activity is openly described. The question is what allows support for a publication and the growth of an asset’s community to be understood as part of a human-rights mission, and how that understanding is tested.

For someone convinced that greater Bitcoin adoption means greater freedom, the answer can seem self-evident. Education creates users, users strengthen the network, and a stronger network is expected to serve more people who need protection from coercion. Each step can be undertaken in good faith. The judgment that needs examination is the one holding the sequence together: whether the expansion of this particular system deserves to count as human progress. If that judgment is treated as settled, the organization can evaluate how effectively it advances Bitcoin without adequately asking when advancing Bitcoin serves its beneficiaries.

I suspect this creates an attractive opportunity for donors interested in laundering Bitcoin marketing through the standing of a human-rights NGO. The public grant record establishes the overlap with promotion, not any particular donor’s private intentions. But a donor seeking that reputational benefit would not need the people at HRF to be cynical collaborators. Sincere advocates could make the case with a conviction a hired advertiser could only imitate. They could report real assistance to real people, and a donor with an interest in Bitcoin’s success could benefit from the resulting association. The humanitarian value of the work and its promotional value could coexist without anyone inventing a beneficiary or falsifying a transaction.

That is why answering this criticism with evidence of sincerity misses it. I am concerned about what sincere belief can make difficult to notice. If the donor’s preferred outcome and the institution’s moral purpose have become conceptually inseparable, whose interests would an employee understand herself to be compromising? She could work hard, help people, and remain entirely convinced that the promotion was justified by the help. A criticism of the arrangement could then sound to her like indifference to those people. The beneficiary’s need would become a defense of an institutional relationship the beneficiary had never been asked to assess.

The test comes when the interests diverge. An independent human-rights program has to be able to conclude that another tool would serve a person better, that adoption created an unacceptable risk, or that an advocate useful to the ecosystem deserves public opposition. It has to be able to report those conclusions even when they disappoint a donor or weaken a story it has told about its own work. I am not claiming that HRF has never made such judgments. I am asking whether its commitment to Bitcoin remains subordinate to them. The distinction matters most when honoring it costs something.

The person receiving help owes the ecosystem no endorsement in return. Her successful transaction establishes that something worked for her under particular circumstances. It does not settle a question about political alliances or validate every larger claim made for the tool. To turn her experience into that validation is to ask her need to carry an argument it cannot establish. The fact that something can be used for freedom does not establish that everyone advancing its adoption is advancing freedom.

I made the distinction in “Bitcoin is a Lie”: a tool claiming to be a truth. In the follow-up about its defenders, I returned to the inadequacy of good intentions as an answer to political conduct. This history supplies the people and institutions through which the larger claim operates. There is no need for a secret command structure, or even for everyone involved to want the same thing. A shared belief can allow people with different interests to understand their cooperation as service to a single moral purpose.

The moral independence of the participant is what gets lost. If Bitcoin’s success is allowed to decide the goodness of the means used to advance it, then the question of what you owe other people becomes conditional on their place in your monetary future. Citizenship contracts into portfolio strategy. The neighbor who does not share your conviction becomes someone history will educate, rather than someone whose interests you must take seriously now.

Democratic politics requires living with people who have not been converted. Their objections do not become illegitimate because you think they misunderstand money, and their right to participate cannot depend on whether their choices maximize the value of your holdings. You have to persuade them, accept limits, and remain answerable when the policy you wanted produces consequences you dislike. The fantasy of a monetary system that settles these obligations is attractive precisely because the obligations are difficult. They remain difficult after you buy Bitcoin. Owning an asset does not give anyone the right to skip them.

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Nashville makes more sense in that light. Trump offered access, favorable rule-making, and protection for an asset the audience had come to celebrate; those promises are in the speech itself. I cannot tell you that everyone who attended welcomed the same bargain. I can tell you that my colleagues were willing to attend, after I had asked them not to, and that I understood their presence as a choice about what they would tolerate.

There was a policy sequel. The March 2025 executive order directed the creation of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, initially to be capitalized with qualifying finally forfeited Treasury bitcoin, and development of budget-neutral acquisition strategies, subject to legal exceptions. That does not establish a purchased policy or tell us what any particular donation caused. It establishes that the movement’s relationship with state power extended beyond applause at a conference.

I do not regret asking people I knew to stay away. The refusal mattered whether or not it changed the event. There are occasions when you have to decide what you are willing to help normalize, and whether the benefits offered to your industry are sufficient to purchase your silence. An account of freedom that cannot help you make that decision is inadequate to the political world in which you actually live.

The dollar may change. Bitcoin may endure. People will continue arguing about the merits of different monetary arrangements, and they should. None of those possibilities settles the obligation that exists before the forecast: you are responsible for what you choose to support, for the power you help legitimate, and for the suffering you become willing to treat as someone else’s necessary lesson.

I know people who look forward to the cleansing. I would rather remain accountable to the people who would have to live through it. Whatever number appears on the screen, that is the side I intend to be on.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

shu