It Began at 623.216

I read a lot of economic and technical literature, leading up to my initial Bitcoin purchase, in spring of 2020.

I read The Bitcoin Standard, by the brilliant and principled Saifedean Ammous. I listened to Nick Szabo's detailed treatise, Shelling Out: the Origins of Money, while cleaning my windows. I allowed myself to get caught up in an endless string of podcasts, by the earnest and ever-charming Marc Friedrich.

But the thing that shook me to the core, and made me a Real Bitcoiner™, was something much more literary and, ironically, anachronistic. Namely, the Bitcoin is Time article, from ⁠Gigi

📰Bitcoin Is Time

You see, I am Catholic.

Now, I am not just a little bit Catholic. I am not Catholic to make myself feel better, look better, or be more popular. I am not comfortably and acceptably Catholic. I'm irritatingly Catholic. Nervingly Catholic. Autistically Catholic. Incorrigably Catholic. Cringingly Catholic.

And what all cringingly Catholic people care about is time. Everything in the Catholic Church revolves around marking time. What day, in the liturgical year, is it? Is this Vespers or can we Compline? Does this Mass count for tomorrow? Are you after baptism, but before confirmation?

The church bells ring the Angelus and the New Years' Day is dedicated to the Mother of our God. Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost allow us to celebrate the Church's major milestones, with all of the in-between pit stops on our pilgrimage through the year. We skip meat on Fridays and catch up with the Sunday roast.

We head out at 4 am, to march to our distant Mass at 4 pm. Nearly 50 km by foot. Preventing ourselves from melting into a puddle on the pavement, by counting our path up the hills with rounds of the rosary... 4 more Hail Mary's and an Our Father to the pinnacle. Don't give up! 3 more Hail Mary's...

Why this obsession with time?

Because marking the passage of time is something that marks us as humans. It is the lower animals, the brutes, and the outcasts who fail to mark their time on Earth. Who simply live into every hour of every day, as if it were interchangeable with every other. Like zombies. Like the lost, cursed to wander in the desert. As if there were no progression, no direction, no movement. It is both a Biblical curse and a sign of societal degeneracy to fail to mark the time.

Because our God is a god that marks the time.

He guards the time so jealousy, that He has set an entire ⅐ of our lives aside, for us to simply sit and contemplate His glory. A ⅐ of every week. Forever. And how do we know that we have reached the seventh day? By counting the days. And how do we count the days? By counting the hours, of course.

📰Quoted article

Clocks, in other words, make humans more human. We have a beginning. We continue on from there, until we reach our earthly End. Our existence is linear. Our focus is forward, always forward, progressing inexorably.

That Bitcoin, itself, is a clock... That Bitcoin is a universal clock... That Bitcoin starts at the beginning, goes on until the end, and then stops, like a clock would... was confirmation for me, that Bitcoin was money designed to serve humanity, rather than humanity being bent to serve the money.

Because what is more human than keeping track of time?

Nothing. Nothing is more human, than that.