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Last Notes

2026-09-06 16:22:35 UTC

Cult, Religion, or Honest Money?
Bitcoin promised to end unearned wealth. Then it minted a new kind. Whether that makes it a faith — or a cult — comes down to a single word: deserve.
Ask a room full of Bitcoiners a hard question about their money and watch what happens. Sometimes you get an argument. Sometimes you get a sermon. And every so often you get the thing that makes outsiders uneasy — the bright, unblinking certainty of someone who has been saved.
So let’s ask it plainly, without sneering and without kneeling: is Bitcoin a cult, a religion, or just honest money?
The answer runs straight through one of the oldest wounds in economics — the question of what wealth we actually earn.
Four people who asked what you deserve
Start with Henry George, writing in 1879. His book Progress and Poverty outsold nearly everything but the Bible in its day, and its puzzle still stings: why does poverty deepen even as societies grow richer? His answer was land. A landlord grows wealthy without building or making anything — simply by owning a plot while the community around it grows and pays him rising rent. The value was created by everyone. It was captured by the owner. George called that rent unearned, and built a whole politics around clawing it back.
Now jump a century to the other George — George Gilder, whose book carries a title that deliberately echoes the wound: Wealth and Poverty. His argument is almost the mirror image. Real wealth, he says, isn’t stuff — it’s knowledge, and its engine is the entrepreneur who creates something that didn’t exist and gives it to the world. To Gilder the enemy isn’t the earner; it’s bad money — currency so unstable that it rewards manipulation over genuine creation. Fix the money, and you free the maker. (It’s no accident Gilder later became a champion of crypto — he saw a chance to make money an honest measuring stick again.)
Then John Maynard Keynes, 1936, coining one of the great cold phrases in economics: the euthanasia of the rentier. A rentier earns simply by owning capital that’s scarce clipping interest, contributing nothing. Keynes thought that as capital grew abundant, the reward for mere ownership should fall toward zero, quietly retiring the “functionless investor.” Unearned income, painlessly put to sleep. And finally Ursula K. Le Guin, in her 1974 novel The Dispossessed, set on a world of anarchists who own nothing and have almost lost the word for property. One of its lines cuts deeper than any economist: let go of the idea that you have earned anything, let go of the whole notion of deserving, and only then will you learn to think.
Hold the four together. George and Keynes want to abolish unearned wealth. Gilder wants to honor the genuinely earned kind. Le Guin doubts the whole idea of desert. But they circle the same fire: which of your wealth did you actually earn — and which did you just receive?
The world the rentier built
Look at the economy you actually live in. To buy a home, you take on thirty years of debt. To start a business, you borrow. To keep pace with rising prices, you’re pushed to invest, to leverage, to stay in the game — because cash left in a drawer quietly loses value every year. Sitting still is punished. Borrowing is rewarded.
There’s a hard little saying for this: only with debt can you live; without debt you merely survive. In a system running on debasement and interest, thriving means taking on leverage — and the people who own the capital, George’s landlords and Keynes’s rentiers, collect the rent either way. Debt isn’t a personal failing here. It’s the entry fee.
This is the trap Bitcoin claims to spring.
Bitcoin’s promise: the honest-money answer
Here’s why Bitcoin walks straight into the middle of all this.
Its entire pitch is that it sorts the earned from the unearned. No central bank can print it, so no one debases your savings to fund themselves — the hidden tax George and Keynes both despised. Its coins come into being through proof of work — literal energy spent, literal effort. Its culture prizes saving, patience, delayed gratification. It presents itself as the first money in a long time that you cannot cheat into existence.
In that telling, Bitcoin is Gilder’s dream and Keynes’s wish at once: honest money that kills the fiat rentier — the banker and bondholder who grow rich off inflation and interest without making a thing. Save in money that can’t rot, the promise goes, and you’ll never need to mortgage your future just to stand still.
It’s a genuinely powerful story. And it’s half true.
The twist: it built a new rentier Now look at who actually got rich from Bitcoin, and how.
They bought early. They held. They did nothing else. As the world slowly arrived, the value of the scarce thing they were sitting on went up, and up. That’s the whole strategy, and the culture wears its name with pride: HODL.
Strip away the affection and describe it flatly. A person grows wealthy by owning a strictly limited asset while the community around it swells and pours in value. The gains were created by everyone who came later. They were captured by whoever owned first.
That is Henry George’s landlord, exactly. Bitcoin’s fixed supply is the ultimate scarce land, and holding it is the purest rent ever devised — you don’t even have to mow the lawn.
So Bitcoin doesn’t abolish unearned wealth. It relocates it. It euthanizes one rentier the fiat banker living off debasement — and crowns another: the early holder living off appreciation. Watch the old saying mutate to fit the new order. In the Bitcoin world, the one who held early lives; the one who arrives late merely survives. Same shape. New owner of the rent.
And that’s where the religion comes in
A system where the early and the patient grow rich for holding needs a story to make that feel right. And the story it reaches for is the oldest one there is: the doctrine of the deserving.
Listen to the language and you’ll hear the church. There’s scripture — a founding text by an absent, near-mythic figure who vanished, leaving only his word. There’s conversion — you get “orange-pilled.” There’s an end-times — the fiat system will fall and the faithful will inherit the earth. There are the saved and the damned — the holders and the “no-coiners.” There are relics and rituals — the seed phrase, the node, the cold-storage sacrament. And there’s the promise every prosperity gospel makes: keep the faith, and you will be rich.
Notice what that story quietly does. It converts luck and timing into virtue. If you got in early, you didn’t get lucky — you saw the truth, you had conviction, you deserve the reward. And if you’re poor for not holding? Well. You deserved that too, for failing to believe.
This is precisely the move Le Guin warns against. The instant you believe you deserve to be rich because you held — and that others deserve their exclusion because they didn’t — you’ve stopped thinking about a technology and started defending a faith. So — cult, religion, or honest money?
Here’s the honest answer, and it borrows from the deepest idea in this whole publication: all money is taken on faith. The dollar in your pocket is a belief propped up by institutions. Bitcoin is a belief propped up by code. Money has always been a shared story we agree to keep telling. So “is Bitcoin a religion?” is the wrong question — every currency is. The real question was never whether there’s faith. It’s what the faith is placed in, and what it does to you.
That gives us a sharper distinction than cult-versus-religion.
A religion, at its best, gives people meaning, community, ritual, a way to act under uncertainty. Plenty of Bitcoiners hold their coins exactly like that — a considered bet on sounder money, held with conviction, questioned freely, worn lightly. That’s faith doing its healthy work.
A cult is what faith becomes when it can no longer be questioned — when doubt is treason, critics are enemies, the founder’s word ends all argument, and, above all, when it starts dividing the world into the deserving and the rest. That’s not a bet anymore. It’s a religion of desert, and it has quietly stopped letting you think.
The tell isn’t the price. It isn’t even the fervor. It’s the word deserve.
The one line to keep
Bitcoin might be the most honest money ever built and a machine for minting a new deserving class — at the very same time. Which one it is for you isn’t set by the protocol. It’s set by whether you can hold the thing without needing the story.
Le Guin saw it before Bitcoin existed: drop the idea that you’ve earned it, drop the whole fantasy of deserving, and you’ll finally be free to think.
Do that, and Bitcoin is a tool — a genuinely radical one.
Refuse, and it’s a church that happens to have a price chart.