What is Bitcoin?

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Why Ministry Leaders Should Consider Bitcoin for Protecting Funds

Every person listening to this who is in ministry and responsible for the use of funds in ministry needs to be thinking about how to create an off-ramp, an exit door out of the system right now where you can be squeezed and choked.

And to be able to get out of that and take the wealth that you have, the funds that God has given to you and put them into a system that cannot be hacked, it cannot be stolen, it cannot be squeezed. It's anonymous, it's secretive.

That's where the entire Christian community needs to be thinking in terms of protecting the wealth and protecting economically their ministry.

Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Introducing Bitcoin and the Bible

All right, well, welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport. I'm joined with my friend here, Pastor Jim Osmond from Kootenai Community Church. Jim, how are you?

I'm doing well, Andrew. Thanks for having me on. Good. Thanks for giving me the privilege of being here and co-hosting with you. I'm assuming that Bud is going to be back in the seat soon.

I keep asking him, and he's like saying, but I like Jim. I want to torture him more.

You know, it hasn't been as difficult to replace him as I thought it would be.

I asked him if he's heard some of the digs you give to him, and he said, no, I skipped right over that. So I mentioned this on Apologetics Live, Jim, but I didn't mention it here. But I had gotten a phone call at the ministry, and a lady called up, and she wanted some help with ordering something from the ministry.

And so she calls up, and then as we're talking, she says she listens to the podcast. And jokingly, I said something about the podcast putting her to sleep, and she was like, oh, oh, because she said she listens to it at night.

And she didn't catch the coupon code when we were running a discount for the What Do We Believe book. And so she called to find out what the code was. So I said, oh, I guess I put you to sleep. And she says, oh, no, it's worse than that.

I'm like, worse than putting you to sleep? She goes, oh, yeah. I have to put on either you or Matt Slick on a loop, otherwise my dog doesn't go to sleep. My dog has to hear one of your voices to be able to sleep.

She goes, in fact, my dog's hearing you on the speakerphone and is wagging his tail and all excited right now. And I'm like, great. I can put your dog to sleep. What wonderful news. That's good. Of course, I waited until Matt was on with me for Apologetics Live to tell him that story.

I figured that's better than calling his radio show and doing it. That would be a little more embarrassing, probably. So in case you think that this podcast isn't good for anything, you now know it's good for putting people and dogs to sleep.

So there you go. But I don't think this episode is going to do that. Now, folks, to let you know, this episode is going to be different than what we usually do. As you know, we've been going through a series on what do we believe.

And as we've been doing that, we've been talking theology. Sometimes we have people that we interview. This is going to be—we're going to be joined by another podcast. And it's another group from the Christian Podcast Community.

It's called Bitcoin and the Bible. And I'm going to have them introduce themselves so you get to know each of their voices. But what we're doing is we want to talk about the issues of money, of Bitcoin, how do you set it up, things like that.

We plan to do two episodes, so this week and next week. And I think that what you'll find is that there's lots of talk of things of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, and people have no clue what it is. It just seems like this mystical thing that is out there that no one has any idea how it works and that makes everyone nervous with it.

And therefore, everyone just kind of avoids it. Let's not talk about it. Let's not think about it. Because it's not that paper that I have in my hand that, well, is losing value day by day. But, hey, don't worry.

If you keep printing more of it, we've been told that if we keep printing more of it, that will prevent inflation. Now, maybe it's me, Jim. I always thought it was when we print more of it that actually creates the inflation.

But, hey—. It does, yes. Yeah, I mean, in 2022—.

It's not a bug, Andrew. It's a feature. Yeah.

Look, 2022, it's just—did you ever have, like, opposite day when you went to school where everything was opposite? Well, I think that's this whole year. It's opposite year. Like, everything we hear from the media, the opposite is what's true.

Yeah, it's been opposite day since 1984, and I use that term advisedly.

I was joking with Matt Slick once, and I sent him a text saying, let's make 1984 fiction again. And he's like, I got to get a t-shirt that says that. I'm like, can you picture just walking around town with a t-shirt?

Let's make 1984 fiction again. Yeah. Unfortunately, the liberals wouldn't even get the joke. They'd be like, what's 1984? What was with that year? Were you born that year or something? So let's bring in the guys from Bitcoin in the Bible.

And folks, if you want to check out Bitcoin in the Bible, all you got to do is, if you go to christianpodcastcommunity .org, under the shows, you'll see Bitcoin in the Bible. They're in season three, which means you guys got some catching up to do.

And this is actually—let me say this before they start speaking—is their podcast is good content. Otherwise, we wouldn't have allowed them on. But it's done in such a way where I really don't often tell you guys that there's a podcast you should binge, meaning you go back to the beginning and listen to all of them.

This is one of them. And the reason I suggest that is because so much of what they teach builds upon what they said in previous episodes. And so they build a foundation and then work off of that foundation.

So it's really good to start with episode one and go through all of them. There's not that many right now, so you can catch up quickly. It's kind of like, you know, you can listen to all of theirs or one James White's dividing line, you know, mega dividing line, you know.

So, Simon, I'll let you start off and you guys introduce yourselves.

God Provides for His People, Including Financial Wisdom

Well, thanks, Andrew. It's really great to be here. And I really appreciate you and Jim and all that you do. And we're just really excited to be a part of the Christian Podcast Community. We really enjoyed our first three seasons of Bitcoin in the Bible.

We're looking forward to continuing to love God's people by sharing what we know and what we've learned and what we're continually adding to our knowledge base to encourage them. That God provides for his people.

I was just thinking of that scripture passage when Abraham takes Isaac out into the wilderness and offers the sacrifice. And Isaac's question for him is just kind of a natural question. It's like, well, where's the sacrifice, right?

And Abraham's answer to him is, well, God will provide. And I think that that's the best way to think about Bitcoin right now is to look around and recognize that God has provided for us richly. And that's the heart of our podcast is to encourage the Christians in our lives and around the world with the message that God has provided for them.

And just to give you a little counterpoint, I was just talking today with one of our newest listeners who just found the podcast last week. He actually found it useful to keep him awake. He was binge listening on a drive, a three-hour drive that ended at two o 'clock in the morning.

And he told me he was really thankful that our content was so compelling that it kept him awake.

Yeah, I guess you and I are in the same reading plan because I just read that this morning in my devotions, that passage. So Dave, how about you? So people can know your voice.

Money, the Great Reset, and the Need for a Sound Monetary System

Yeah, Andrew and Jim, it's a pleasure to be on with you guys. And I just have the opportunity to talk about what is money and how does it work? Why is Bitcoin a superior money, particularly at this stage in world history when there is definitely a great reset happening?

It's no longer a conspiracy idea. It's mainstream. It's underway. So a lot of the conversations that we were having privately and offline a year ago or so, we said, hey, what do you think about the idea of trying to podcast and seeing if others might benefit from that?

And so we've been really gratified with the number of people who have responded affirmatively. And even around the world, it's been kind of amazing the responses that have come in from various parts of the world.

And so with this great reset underway, the transition that's happening, I think it's incumbent upon the church to really understand these things and put themselves in a position to thrive going forward.

And Will.

Why People Struggle to Understand Bitcoin

Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having us on. I think extending what David was saying, just this podcast has been an amazing resource for myself as I talk to people and am able to refer them back to episodes where, hey, we actually spent an hour talking about that.

You can go check this episode out and listen. And that's been super helpful. And it's just been amazing to be able to have these conversations to cut through the fog. As you were mentioning, Andrew, there's so many people who haven't the faintest idea about any of these things.

They try not to think about it scary. They hear and fall for marketing hype all the time. And to be able to sit down and have these clear, concise, cogent conversations and cut through that and help people really understand why, what is it, what differentiates it from other things has been, I think, a blessing in my own life.

And I know that I've heard from others that it has been a blessing in theirs as well.

Yeah. And so folks know the three of you are related to one another, right? So Dave, you've been a pastor for many years, retired. You're kind of the Bible guy. You're the one with the background in the Bible.

Your son here, Will, you're kind of the technical guy. You have the good handle on how this all works. If I remember correctly, you've actually went through the blockchain yourself. We'll have to explain what that is later, but actually went through and checked that on your own.

So you got some computer skills. And then Simon is, David, your son-in-law, and he's kind of the podcast guy. He's the one that you guys dump everything on. You guys just talk about your expertise and you dump everything on him and let him go.

That's how that works, right, Simon?

I'm the janitor. I just clean up after these guys.

Everything they say wrong, they leave it to you to edit out. And I do have to say, so this is really—I want to give you guys a quick opportunity. If there's anything you'd want to correct your pastor on, I mean, anything you want to say negative about him.

I mean, now would be a great time. By the way, who's your pastor?

Some guy by the name of Jim Osmond. I don't know if you've heard of him. Yeah, that name sounds familiar. I think he wrote a book. Oh, that's right. He did write a book. He's written more than one, but he's always shilling them somewhere.

Let me ask you, does he stand up at the pulpit holding up God Doesn't Whisper while he preaches? No. No, he actually has it taped to the pulpit, so it's like he doesn't have to hold it up.

He goes out of his way to not shill. Yeah, I know.

So for folks to know that you guys attend church up at Kootenai Community Church, and so you guys are blessed with having Jim's preaching every week. And so I want to get into first—I'll direct this, Dave, to you a bit.

What Money Is and How Currency Works

When we talk about currency, there's something you had said that the issue is most people don't even understand currency. And before we started recording, I started sharing with you—I want to say fifth, maybe sixth grade, I remember a video that—it was like this extended view.

It was like one of these ones where the teacher didn't want to actually teach for two months and just played a video. But I still remember it. It was trying to explain currency. And it was like, okay, barter system.

Someone is a carpenter, someone's a farmer, a blacksmith. How do they find equal value in something? They would start by sharing things, but a blacksmith isn't going to share a horseshoe because that's of no value.

And so they start sharing corn because that's something that everyone—it had some stability, and it could last for a little while, some durability, and then it could be shared, and X number of corns on the cob would be worth this work, that work.

But then they realized that corn was breaking down over time for those who tried to save it, so they had to move to something that would be based in corn to then be able to have that same value. Then it moved to—of course, back then, I'm old enough where they still talked about a gold standard.

They talked about them moving to a gold standard, and I know the generation now probably doesn't even—there's not even talk of a gold standard. But talked about moving to something that was durable, that could last, that had all these values or qualities, and then could be traded and have a value in it.

And that really was helpful in understanding, okay, how does currency work and things? But for most people, you're right, they have no concept of currency, no biblical understanding of why do we even have money?

What does money do for us? How should we view money? Could you help us out with some of that, just with what—I'll ask the broad question, what is currency? Sure, thank you.

I think I would begin, actually, I would begin at the very beginning in Genesis, that God created Adam and Eve, placed them in a garden, gave them a job to do, which was to tend his garden, and thus work is built into the human condition.

It is a good and noble thing given by God. And the fruit of our work, the fruit of our labor, we can trade with one another, because no one is self-sufficient. And so a barter system is the trading of the product of one's labor, and it begins, but it has all kinds of limitations, as you mentioned with the horseshoe and so forth.

It's kind of hard to make change if you're a blacksmith, and if you need to find somebody who needs your product and wants your product now, rather than six months from now, and so forth. So it didn't take, you know, the human population very long to figure out that they needed some sort of medium of exchange.

And I think that's what money begins with, is a medium of exchange. It's a way to facilitate trade with one another, and thus that increases the prosperity of a society. It is a rising tide that goes with trade, and so overall society prospers.

The more sound the money system is, the more easily it facilitates trade with one another. And so from the very beginning, chapters of Genesis, we see that. They latched onto things like cattle and gold and silver and so forth, but that's long, that's hundreds and hundreds of years before coinage was developed.

So it was, and that's why the Bible talks about weights and measures. These things were weighed out, and the Bible says that God cares about such things, that he wants honest weights and measures, that all the weights of the bag are his concern.

And so God has a concern for commerce. He wants, he's honest, he wants his people to be honest. That system operated worldwide for a very long time. It was more formalized, and now we're fast forwarding thousands of years, but it was more formalized into a gold standard, whereby the world naturally migrated towards the best money, the hardest money, the money that had a very limited supply, because obviously if you're trying to store your labor and money for future purchases, if somebody is creating more of it constantly, that dilutes the effects of your labor over time, and that's really what inflation is.

And so gold, it's indestructible, it's limited in supply, and thus it creates the idea of a store of value and so forth. It's purity is reasonably easy to determine. And so gold became kind of a base layer money of the world economy.

And the technological advancement that layered on top of that really was the paper money system that all of us have grown up in. We haven't known anything else. We've not been alive when the dollar was exchangeable for gold coinage, which it was up until the 1930s.

So moving from gold, I mean, gold is heavy, it's hard to move, it's expensive, it's subject to confiscation or robbery or whatever. And so the ability to move paper money, which were really just claim checks on gold, the gold was stored with the goldsmiths who became bankers and they would issue paper receipts.

And so you could carry a fistful of paper receipts in your pocket. You could exchange it for goods and services because people knew they could always go to the bank and hand in their piece of paper and then they could have the gold coinage anytime they wanted it.

Well, that was just too lucrative for anybody to let go for very long. And so they started printing more receipts for the gold than the actual gold existed. And the basic idea was nobody's going to come all at the same time and ask for all the gold back.

And that's how the system operated. And probably the next advancement, I guess, would be beyond paper. Because paper money now is just really a small fraction of the world's money supplies. So it's electronic, digital money.

We're all using digital money. Every time you take a piece of plastic out of your wallet, you're creating digital money. The money now, they've moved off of the gold standard. Money now is borrowed into creation.

So what backs the money is debt. And so money is really just a claim on a debt obligation from someone else. So whenever the commercial banks make a loan, they create money. Whenever the government issues its treasury bonds and the Federal Reserve buys them, that creates money.

And so you have this edifice of growing debt and growing money. And that's the predicament we find ourselves in now where the debt has spiraled out of control. It cannot be repaid. And there's going to need to be some sort of a reset and a new monetary system.

And here's where we are.

Money Must Be Agreed Upon in a Free Market

So, David, would you say concerning currency that in order for something to be a medium of exchange, the value of that medium has to be agreed upon by both parties? So, for instance, if you and I, if I grow apples and you grow cows and I want to trade you apples for beef, but we decide to use something else other than a one-to-one, peer-to-peer trade of directly those commodities, we both have to agree that gold is valuable to both of us.

Otherwise, I would never give up my apples to somebody for gold and then turn around and try and give my gold to you if you don't value gold or if I don't value gold. So really, everybody has to value the medium of exchange in order for it to function as money, correct?

Yes, in a free market system. That's exactly right. And so that people will just naturally flow towards the thing that satisfies the principles of money, a store of value long term, right? A medium of exchange and those kinds of ideas has to be divisible, has to be recognizable, just, you know, the basic characteristics of money.

And historically, lots of things have been used. And the problem with all of them is that they leaked too much. They weren't a closed system. And so eventually gold was the best closed system that was available at the time, but people have figured out how to create leaks in that one too.

Even when you think about 1940s in Germany, and I don't know how much you guys had studied this, but when the Jewish people were taken into the, before the concentration camps, they were first put into the ghettos.

And in the ghettos, yeah, you had people that they were forced in, they took whatever valuables they could take. And it was interesting. One of the things that came out of it is people took like gold and jewelry and things like that, but in the ghetto, that had no value.

Pots, pans, clothing, that's what mattered. All of a sudden the currency changed. It changed from the German mark and the gold to being things that they needed that the Germans weren't going to provide, that they needed to live.

And all of a sudden the currency changed very quickly. And those that had all the money and the gold and they thought that was the value suddenly found themselves on the poor end of things because they didn't have the stuff that people needed to trade with.

Sure, absolutely.

Inside of a prison, gold is not the means of exchange. It's cigarettes or drugs. I mean, if you were shipwrecked on a desert island in private coconuts, you can't eat gold. So it's whatever the society agrees to.

As Jim said, he's got apples, I've got cattle. We've got to agree on something. It could be shoes. It could be really many kinds of things that would be able to do that. Will, what are your thoughts?

Money Is a Technology, Not an Intrinsically Valuable Thing

I think what we're driving at is that money does not have intrinsic value. So money is an emergent property. It's a technology. And so in whatever circumstance, in whatever culture, in whatever society, in whatever time, that thing which best represents all of the characteristics of money is the best money.

So in the ghettos, if the gold and the jewelry is not desired, it's not fulfilling that medium of exchange, that store of value, there's a superior money at the time. Now, I would say if those ghettos persisted for hundreds of years and you would probably see a revert to the main and you would see gold have been reselected once things had stabilized.

So in the short term, it didn't work. But over the long term, it would have regained its prominence. But we need to recognize and clarify in our minds that money is not valuable because it has intrinsic value.

Money is the only good in the economy that you want more of, not for its own sake. You don't want money because you want money. You want money because money is the flexibility to acquire other goods and services in the economy.

Yeah, for what it can do for you.

Exactly. David talked about gold being a form of money. We have obviously paper money now or paper currency now that everybody agrees is valuable, or at least we exchange this, and it has no intrinsic value as Will was saying.

But gold has certain limitations that paper money or even digital money overcomes. Gold has certain things that make it less desirable than other means in certain circumstances. So can you guys maybe describe or speak to that?

Go ahead, Simon.

Gold Stores Value, Fiat Moves Easily

Yeah, you go back to Genesis and you think about the relationship between money and work. And you remember that money is a way to transmit your energy, to take the energy that you put into your work and your productive output, and to share it or to buy with it, right?

To buy from someone else. But the other function of money is to be the store of value. And the function of gold that gold does really well is that gold stores value over time really, really well. It holds its purchasing power well over time because the supply of it is so difficult, right?

Really, what money is showing you is that people choose the resource or the entity that produces the most work to create. It takes a lot of work to mine gold out of the ground. And there are a lot of unsuccessful gold mines out there that add to that work.

And so you can rest assured that when you work hard and then exchange your time and energy for gold, that gold will hold that purchasing power well over time. But what gold does horribly well is transmit value over space, right?

It's really difficult to pay somebody on the East Coast with your gold bars in your pocket. And that's really that issue that gold ran into that fiat currencies, currencies that were decreed into existence by central banks and governments around the world solves, is the ability to basically offer paper-based or digital IOUs that allow you to transmit value over time.

The issue with those currencies becomes the reality that when the supply of the currency is not limited, not finite, controllable by a centralized entity or by the debt that can be used to back it, that you can't hold value over time any longer.

So you're left with this conundrum. My money is either really valuable over time, gold, or it's really valuable over space, fiat, but it's not both. And that's really why we are so excited about Bitcoin is we finally have arrived at a money that can hold its value well over both space and time and preserve ultimately the work of the person who bought it rather than stealing it from him.

I would love to see you exchange a bar of gold that you have in your pocket. When we as Christians, we see in scripture, the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And so what I've noticed is that Christians have a certain view of money.

One, like, money is evil. And they forget that it's the love of money. But there's also a thing where what I find a lot is people who— what they end up doing is viewing, like, the televangelists and people like that that want money for themselves.

And then as Christians, it's like, oh, we shouldn't talk about money. We shouldn't look to—especially if you're in ministry. I know this as someone who's in ministry. People are like, oh, well, you shouldn't have money.

I actually was in a church where they said, we're bringing in a new pastor, and one of the deacons said, well, it's our job to keep him humble, so we shouldn't pay him very much. No, no, that's the Holy Spirit's job.

But this is a mindset that many Christians have. So let me ask you guys, I mean, what should be the Christian's view toward money? Is it an evil? Is it good? Is it okay to seek to earn money?

Money Is Morally Neutral, But the Love of Money Is Dangerous

Money is a morally neutral technology. It's a storage bucket, a mechanism to set aside your labor, right? And so we know labor is good. We can deduce that very easily from the creation narrative. And there's plenty of New Testament, you know, work heartily unto the Lord and so forth.

So money is the means and mechanism of storing your labor, storing, as Simon referred to, your energy that you've plowed into your work. And so it's the greed that causes one to love money. That is what the Bible is criticizing, right?

But the technology itself is merely the means to say, hey, I worked yesterday and that labor, I don't need it until next year. And so how do I hang on to it so that I don't have to live hand to mouth day by day by day, trying to earn enough each day for whatever might come my way?

Money gives me that ability to store it.

And think about the biblical precedents, right? Abraham, Genesis 13, verse 2, was very rich in livestock and silver and gold. Isaac, Job, Solomon, right? You can go down the list, right? God calls some of those men very righteous, says that they walked with God, right?

So we are honestly compelled to believe that God has given us the capacity as intelligent human beings, exercising dominion over the earth that he has created us to rule over, that we can use the money that he has allowed us to choose freely in a way that honors and glorifies him, just like the patriarchs did.

So I want to go back to something you guys said earlier, because I think that a lot of people listening to this would have been tracking with you for a period of time as you talked about what money is, how it functions, and they understand store value over time, store value over space, all that's good, medium of exchange that we both agree upon.

And then you said that Bitcoin is money. And that's a leap that I think a lot of people are going to say, okay, what do you mean it's money? I have never exchanged Bitcoin for anything, and you can't put Bitcoin in my hand.

I can't hand it to you. I can understand how gold is money. I can understand how fiat paper is money. I can understand how corn and apples and beef and shoes and pearls and beads and rocks and seashells and coconuts can become money because I can hold all of those.

But how can you tell me that Bitcoin is money? Bitcoin is just zeros and ones in the ether, and I don't even agree on its value with anybody else. How does that function as money, and how is it better money than fiat or gold?

How does it function in that way when I can't hold it in my hand?

And also with that, if you could define some terms, like what is fiat? What is, when people talk cryptocurrency, what's Bitcoin? Define those, because remember, some people, this is the first time they're hearing these terms, or they might have heard the terms but have no idea what it is.

It went over their head, and they have no concept of it. And that's really the thing with what Jim's saying. You can't put it in your hand, so people just want to ignore it and say we can't comprehend it.

Fiat Money, Debt, and the Dematerialization of Currency

Maybe we can back our way into this. So the present system that we operate under, we call it a fiat system, meaning that the money that is used is required by the various governments to be the means by which you pay your taxes.

So they require you to pay your taxes in this local currency. Therefore, they have decreed it to be the currency. That's a mechanism and the force by which they execute their fiat. But it's all debt-based money.

In other words, if you go to buy a house, you go to the bank and you want to buy a house, and you borrow half a million dollars to buy a house, the bank doesn't go to the vault and open it up and pull out paper, totaling it with ones and zeros, totaling up to half a million dollars.

They make an entry on a computer, and half a million dollars springs into existence, and it is created as a loan that you owe, and it's transferred to the account of the guy with the house, and he hands you the house.

It's moved in the ether. It's merely ones and zeros, and if you look around, and the average bloke probably hasn't got 30 bucks in paper in his wallet. What he's got is pieces of plastic, or he's got a bank statement.

Even that's probably online that represents that he has money, but you can't touch any of it. It doesn't exist. You just go to the bank, try to draw out, tell them you want $10 ,000, and they'll tell you to go away and come back.

They don't have it. So we're already in a world in which money has been dematerialized. That happened a long time ago, and the reason it happened was to facilitate trade. It's virtually impossible to move around large quantities of gold, and so the technological improvement, of course, was the banking system and the ability to transact through that intermediary and the computer improvement upon that.

It used to be paper ledger. The computer improvement now is that it's all ones and zeros, and the trade has moved around that way. But the important thing, I think, to recognize is that with gold, and Simon referred to this, there's a lot of energy and effort and capital that has gone into the mining and coinage of gold, and that's all in the past.

It's all invested in the gold. It doesn't require anything new to happen in order for its value to be taken back out of it, but in the debt money system, all money now is backed up by a promise of future performance, and so what we've done is we are reaching into the future for the future's prosperity, and we are importing it into the present, and we're using that to secure our money, and that creates a spiraling problem, obviously, because you've got to reach deeper and deeper into the future as you continue to pull money into the present.