Why are people calling Bitcoin a religion?
Read enough about Bitcoin, and you’ll inevitably come across people who refer to the cryptocurrency as a religion. Bloomberg’s Lorcan Roche Kelly called Bitcoin “the first true religion of the 21st century.” Bitcoin promoter Hass McCook has taken to calling himself “The Friar” and wrote a series of Medium pieces comparing Bitcoin to a religion.
There is a Church of Bitcoin, founded in 2017, that explicitly calls legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto its “prophet.” In Austin, Texas, there are billboards with slogans like “Crypto Is Real” that weirdly mirror the ubiquitous billboards about Jesus found on Texas highways.
Like many religions, Bitcoin even has dietary restrictions associated with it. So does Bitcoin’s having prophets, evangelists and dietary laws make it a religion or not?
As a scholar of religion, I think this is the wrong question to ask. The dirty secret of religious studies is that there is no universal definition of what religion is.
