# Cryptocurrencies

Explore how cryptocurrencies intersect with Mormon Transhumanist thought—bridging faith, technology, and the future of decentralized digital economies.

[Image: When individuals transact using cryptocurrencies, they rely on public-key cryptography to authorize the exchange without a financial intermediary. The shared ledger acts as a decentralized seal, ensuring the integrity of the transfer while keeping personal data private.]

Cryptocurrencies are monetary systems secured by cryptography and recorded on distributed ledgers, issued by protocol rather than by a state. Bitcoin began operating in 2009. The novelty was never digital money, since bank balances have been digits for decades. The novelty was removing the central issuer and replacing an institutional ledger-keeper with rules that anyone can verify, and no one can quietly revise.

Scripture says nothing about blockchain technology and a great deal about money, weights, and who controls access to exchange. That second subject is where the theology lives.

## OF Weights and Measures

[Image: Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Proverbs present false weights and balances as enablers of quiet theft from those who cannot reliably verify the amounts.]

The law treats fraudulent measurement as a moral offense rather than a commercial one. Leviticus forbids false balances, Deuteronomy calls divers weights an abomination, and Proverbs repeats the charge (Leviticus 19:35-36; Deuteronomy 25:13-16; Proverbs 11:1). The grievance is that whoever holds the scales can steal invisibly, a little at a time, from people who have no way to check.

Alma 11 describes the Nephite system of senines and senums in unusual detail, then immediately introduces a lawyer who grows rich by contention. The record sets the standard beside its abuse. A blockchain attempts a weight that cannot be shaved: a published issuance schedule, an auditable history, and enforcement by mathematics instead of by the honesty of the party holding the ledger. “Trustless” overstates the achievement. Trust is distributed and made checkable rather than abolished, which is a better description of faith anyway.

## No Man Might Buy or Sell

Revelation describes a mark without which no one may buy or sell (Revelation 13:16-17). Whatever John intended, the mechanism he names—exchange conditioned on authorization—is now straightforward to build. Frozen accounts, payment processors removing disfavored customers, and central bank digital currencies with programmable restrictions all implement it.

Doctrine and Covenants 121 observes that almost all men, given a little authority, begin to exercise unrighteous dominion. Decentralization is essential to human thriving, and theosis in any general and inclusive sense is not sustainable without it. The point is not that distributed systems make people good. The point is that they limit what the corrupt can accomplish, so that even parties intending abuse find themselves increasingly unable to follow through.

## Mammon and the Silicon Crucible

The casino is real. Tokens surge and collapse, leverage spawns like digital fungi, and fraud recurs. Israel made the golden calf out of its own jewelry, which is what speculative idolatry usually looks like: value the people manufacture and then worship. The warning about the love of money applies without modification.

Financial nihilism, though, is the default state of frontier monetary systems rather than a defect peculiar to this one. The Continental Dollar collapsed, the dollar took a century to mature, and the chaos functioned as a filter separating monetary fantasies from monetary foundations. Cryptocurrency compresses that filtering into months. All values get forged in fire, instrumental values included, and money is the ultimate abstraction of instrumental values.

Zion remains the standard against which any monetary technology should be measured: one heart, one mind, and no poor among them (Moses 7:18). Money is a means, and this one earns its place only to the extent that it decentralizes power and widens participation. Consecration has to be given. A ledger no one can seize is one precondition for giving it freely.

*See also*: [Blockchain](/topical-guide/blockchain), [Cryptography](/topical-guide/cryptography), [Decentralization](/topical-guide/decentralization), [Ethics](/topical-guide/ethics), [Law](/topical-guide/law), [Money](/topical-guide/money)