Until now, the Bitcoin writing here has approached it from the outside — as a machine to be understood, a system to be analysed, an asset to be reasoned about: thermodynamics, hashrate, monetary architecture. This one approaches it from the inside, and asks a question the engineering cannot touch: what happens to a person who genuinely understands what Bitcoin is? Not what they own. What they come to believe — about money, about institutions, about reality, and about themselves. The claim, developed most beautifully by the writer Tomer Strolight, is that Bitcoin is not primarily a financial technology at all. It is a spiritual catalyst disguised as one.
The argument begins with the nature of the Satoshi story. Every civilisation has founding myths — stories that carry meaning regardless of whether they literally happened. The story of Bitcoin’s creation has the shape of exactly such a myth: a mysterious figure appears in a time of crisis, solves an impossible problem, creates something that will outlast them, and then vanishes without claiming reward. But this myth has a property no previous myth possessed. It is verifiably true. You do not have to take it on faith. The code is open. The ledger is public. The untouched fortune is visible to anyone who cares to look. It is a myth in the form of a fact — and that is something genuinely new in human history.
The Four Beliefs Bitcoin Dismantles
What makes the story spiritually potent is what it does to the beliefs of the person who absorbs it. Strolight identifies four widely held convictions — the kind most people carry around unexamined, as if they were simply how the world works — and shows that the plain facts of Bitcoin’s existence refute each one.
Look at what each refutation does. The first tells you that authority is not the same as truth — that the experts can be wrong, confidently and collectively, about what is possible. The second tells you that the modern surveillance world is not as total as it claims; a single person evaded it for over a decade and a half by choosing to. The third is perhaps the most quietly subversive: it tells you that the cynical theory of human nature — that everyone is ultimately driven by greed and the will to power — is simply, demonstrably false. Somewhere, someone built something worth a hundred billion dollars and walked away without taking a cent. And the fourth tells you that the state, which presents itself as the final authority over money and life, met something it could not bend.
The beliefs we held turned out to be the myths. The story that sounded like a myth turned out to be the verifiable truth.
— after Tomer Strolight
This is the inversion at the heart of the essay. We tend to think of myths as the comforting stories and of our cynical assumptions as hard-nosed realism. Bitcoin reverses the polarity. The cynical assumptions — expert finality, the impossibility of privacy, the universality of greed, the omnipotence of the state — turn out to be the myths. And the story that sounds mythical turns out to be the documented, timestamped, independently verifiable truth.
Purification: What Is Money, Alone?
The second movement is about purity, in a precise, almost chemical sense. Fiat money never arrives by itself. It comes bundled with a whole apparatus: a government that issues it, a central bank that manages it, a military that ultimately backs it, an inflation policy that slowly dilutes it. When you hold a euro, you are not holding money — you are holding money fused with all of these institutions, inseparable from them.
Bitcoin is the first money in history that exists apart from all of it. No issuer. No central manager. No state. No inflation by decree. It is money reduced to its essence — money as such, separated from every institution that has historically been confused with it. And the moment you see money in this purified form, a powerful question becomes available: how much of what I thought was money was actually just the institutions attached to it?
Strolight’s most provocative move is to generalise the question. Once you have learned to separate the essence of money from the institutions that claim it, you can perform the same separation everywhere. What is education, separated from schooling? What is health, separated from the medical establishment? What is law, separated from the legal system? And — most pointedly — what is spirituality, separated from the institutions that claim to speak on its behalf? Bitcoin teaches a mental operation: distinguish the thing itself from the institution that has captured it. That operation, once learned, does not stay confined to money.
The Immaterial Made Undeniable
The third movement is the deepest. Bitcoin is purely digital. It has no physical substrate you can point to — no coin in a vault, no note in a wallet, no metal bar. What exists is information: a position in a distributed ledger, secured by energy, verified by mathematics. And yet it is unmistakably real. It can be owned, lost, stolen, transferred, and valued. People have reorganised their entire lives around it.
To accept Bitcoin, then, is to accept a proposition that runs against the grain of materialist common sense: that something with no physical form can be entirely, consequentially real. And here is the spiritual hinge. Once you have genuinely accepted that the immaterial can be real — not as a figure of speech, but as a fact you have staked value on — a question opens that cannot easily be closed again. What else is immaterial and yet real? Consciousness has no physical form you can hold, yet nothing is more real to you than your own awareness. Free will, meaning, love, the sense of the sacred — none of them are material, and all of them are real to the people who experience them.
To hold Bitcoin is to have already conceded the premise: that the immaterial can be completely real. The only question left is how far that concession reaches.
This is the pantheist intuition — that the divine or the universal is immanent within the material world rather than separate from it. It is Schopenhauer’s Will — immaterial, omnipresent, not bound to any particular piece of matter, yet the underlying substance of everything. Bitcoin’s “force” has a strangely similar structure: immaterial as information, anchored in physical energy through Proof of Work, omnipresent as a global network. It is a small, concrete, financial rehearsal for a much larger metaphysical idea — the same one I built Immanence to make experiential.
The Treasure That Cannot Be Taken
The final movement returns to Satoshi’s untouched fortune — roughly a million bitcoin, visible to everyone, reachable by no one but their creator, unmoved for over fifteen years. This is not wealth but a monument: it sits on the ledger as a permanent, public, incorruptible fact, renewed with every block — a demonstration that a person can create something of immense value and want nothing from it.
And there is a deeper symbolism in how people come to Bitcoin. Most arrive out of self-interest — the hope of gain, the fear of missing out. Greed, or something adjacent to it, is the usual doorway. But for those who go far enough in, the pursuit of gain turns into something else: an inquiry into what money is, what value is, what is real, and eventually what they themselves actually believe. The greed that opened the door becomes irrelevant once inside. The real treasure is not the coins. It is the journey the coins provoke — the discovery of what is true, what is pure, and who you are.
What It Means
Bitcoin’s technical properties are not separate from its philosophical force. They are the source of it. The disappearance is what refutes the greed thesis. The immateriality is a consequence of being pure information secured by energy (the thermodynamic anchor and the leaderless lifecycle that enforces it). The resistance to states follows from decentralisation. The spiritual reading is not a mystical overlay on the technology; it is what the technology means once you follow its implications all the way down.
The single most useful habit Bitcoin teaches is the purification operation: the separation of a thing from the institution that has captured it. Money from the state. And then, by extension, education from schooling, health from the medical system, spirituality from religion, truth from authority. This is not anti-institutionalism for its own sake. It is the discipline of asking, in every domain, “what is the thing itself, stripped of the apparatus that claims to own it?”
And the immaterial is the real frontier. The deepest gift of Bitcoin, in this reading, is that it forces materialists to concede — with their own capital — that something with no physical form can be completely real. That concession is the crack through which larger questions enter: about consciousness, free will, meaning, and the sacred. Bitcoin does not answer the spiritual questions. It reopens them — for a generation that had been taught they were closed.
Flight Log — Dispatch from Altitude
At 38,000 feet, on a clear night over the Atlantic, you can see more stars than seems possible — and you become aware of something easy to forget on the ground: that almost everything keeping the aircraft in the air is invisible. Lift is not a thing you can hold. It is a pressure difference across a wing, a consequence of airflow, an immaterial phenomenon that nonetheless carries seventy tonnes of metal and two hundred lives across an ocean. The air is invisible. The magnetic field the compass reads is invisible. The radio waves carrying my clearance are invisible. I stake my life, every working day, on immaterial things being completely real.
Pilots are, in a quiet way, professional believers in the invisible. Not on faith — on evidence. I cannot see lift, but I can measure its effects with total precision, and I trust it the way I trust the ground. The immaterial, in aviation, is not the opposite of the real. It is the most real thing there is. The metal is just along for the ride.
I think this is why the philosophical reading of Bitcoin landed on me the way it did. I already live in a world where the invisible is load-bearing — where the things you cannot touch are the things that hold you up. Bitcoin asks everyone else to make the concession I make every time I push the thrust levers forward: that something with no physical form can be entirely, consequentially, life-or-death real. And once you have made that concession — really made it, with something at stake — the questions do not stop at money. If immaterial value is real, what about immaterial meaning? If a network with no physical centre can hold value, what about a consciousness with no physical location holding a self?
I do not have the answers. But I have noticed that the people who fly, and the people who truly understand Bitcoin, tend to arrive at the same quiet conclusion: the material world is the smaller part of what is real. The energy dissipates. The proof remains. The metal lands. And the invisible thing that carried it — the lift, the value, the meaning — was the realest part of the whole flight.