“Bitcoin adoption becomes a conviction.”
Bitcointed
We are very sorry to inform you that the Bitcoin bros are so not okay, and that some of them have started believing that the cryptocurrency was sent down by the Christian God.
“This is the genius of God,” Tomer Strolight, a former nonbeliever who got into Bitcoin and subsequently got baptized because of it, told Slate.
No, this isn’t the the start of a 60 Minutes investigation. Instead, it’s yet another look into the curious psyches of Bitcoin true believers, who in this case have married their love of crypto with the divine love of Jesus Christ.
Strolight decided to take the plunge while attending the first annual Thank God for Bitcoin conference, he told Slate, which as its name suggests is a con specifically for Christian Bitcoiners. There, he waded into the warm waters of Miami’s South Beach and was born again as a Christian Bitcoin Bro.
Admit It!
The report notes that Bitcoin Christianity actually makes sense given how deeply crypto has crashed in recent months, meaning a religious framing seems almost necessary to continue to believe in 2022.
“Bitcoin adoption becomes a conviction,” former ear, nose, and throat surgeon-turned-Christian author Patrick Melder — who baptized Strolight himself on South Beach — wrote in his self-published book “The Christian Case for Bitcoin,” not to be confused with the essay anthology for which the conference is named, “Thank God for Bitcoin.”
Gospel Proof
As Texas State University Religious Studies Professor Joseph Laycock told Slate, this sort of cryptofied Christianity makes more sense when considering the American evangelical strain of “prosperity gospel,” which, in the post-Depression era, claimed Jesus wanted his followers to become rich.
Indeed, Melder’s declaration in his book that “in the not-too-distant future, those who adopted Bitcoin early, will be immensely wealthy” sounds a whole lot like your garden variety crypto bro, evangelicalism non-withstanding.
“Do you believe Bitcoin is the only coin, the true coin?” the author joked in his interview with Slate, miming a Bitcoin baptism. “I now raise you in the new life of Bitcoin.”
May God help us all.
READ MORE: The People Who Are Finding God Through, and in, Bitcoin [Slate]
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