Moral Money: The Case for Bitcoin (Eric Sammons)

Thoughts on the first 'Catholic' Bitcoin Book

A confession: I occasionally get asked to speak to Catholic Church leaders about bitcoin. The idea sounds straightforward enough: it's moral money, potentially lucrative, so what could go wrong?

As it turns out, quite a lot.

While I’ve observed plenty of individual Catholics using bitcoin in various ways, my interactions with the broader institutional Church often run up against a sort of ‘decision by committee’ bureaucracy. Exceptions exist on the fringes, the great Benedictines of Mary Queen of the Apostles being one. But generally speaking, Church pension funds, endowments, and collection baskets have not yet adopted this 16-year-old technology, let alone the best performing asset of the last decade (save Fr. Blaha’s parish lightning node).

This is why it is a big deal that Eric Sammons' new book was released with a Catholic publisher; the erudite Sophia Institute Press, at that. While it was probably time for a book like this to be published for Catholics, Sammons is one of the few prominent authors who could have actually gotten it done. I've followed Eric's work since 2016-2017, when he was among the few (if any) Catholic thinkers taking bitcoin seriously. He was onto then what many missed (and still do): it’s not about ‘the blockchain’, tokenizing everything, name-your-niche-crypto narrative, etc. It’s about the money.

So I was glad to offer my endorsement for the book:

A Structure of Sin

Sammons opens boldly: our current financial system constitutes what he calls a "structure of sin." He writes "this hamster-wheel of excessive spending, risky investments, and debt slavery is engendering financial nihilism among the young." Remember those quaint times when "just save your money" was legitimate financial advice? Now we have to give warnings about inflation, market volatility, and the imperative to "put your money to work." This shift tells us everything. I think this is the Catholic case for bitcoin in a nutshell: savings are a fundamental good, families need savings to grow and prosper, but fiat currency (i.e. money by decree) has undermined our basic ability to save.

Bitcoin is a sound money alternative that restores and improves upon savings technology.

And why not? Christ talked about money more than any other topic. Nearly 15% of his recorded teachings address financial matters. Yet somehow, we've managed to treat our monetary system as morally neutral background noise. Like the weather or gravity. We've become so accustomed to inflation, debt cycles, and financial fragility that we think these conditions are normal.

Bitcoin as Moral Framework

Here enters bitcoin. Sammons engages with bitcoin's technical attributes as a moral framework. Design features like the 21 million fixed supply, proof-of-work consensus, and cryptographic verification could embody ethical principles in ways our institutions have struggled. The properties of the system create incentive structures that either support or undermine human flourishing.

A good example fleshed out here is the Cantillon Effect. This is the idea that those closest to money creation benefit disproportionately from new money entering the system. Under fiat currency, this creates systematic advantages for the well-connected, while gradually eroding the purchasing power of ordinary people's savings. If it bothers you when mega corporations receive billion dollar bailouts at the downstream expense of a families’ basic food budget, you naturally intuit this. Bitcoin's predetermined inflation schedule eliminates this inequality, which the book argues reflects the Church's preferential option for the poor.

All of this line of reasoning makes me wonder, why shouldn't there be a Catholic ethics of money production? The Church already has teachings on inflation, usury, and currency debasement, but these seem to have been relegated to the obscure and arcane.

Bitcoin, by contrast, has its ethical framework built directly into its code.

Nicolas Oresme pictured on the cover of Guido Hulsmann’s '“The Ethics of Money Production”

Getting to Honest Money

There are questions raised here that I still wrestle with. If the end game of bitcoin adoption is a sound money standard, what will it take to get there? Does this monetary upgrade also create new contexts for vice (i.e. the overnight millionaire problem, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations, wealth for its own sake, etc.)? We have seen how the speculation phase of bitcoin adoption has come with its own share of insanity at times.

There is also the question of transition. The path from here to sound money involves disruption to the status quo. Let’s be honest, some of our institutions are flawed, but for better or worse provide essential services. A monetary upgrade, however justified theoretically, will likely impose real costs on real people. Priests and Bishops will naturally worry about their parishioners bearing the costs, even when the long-term benefits seem clear.

Sammons acknowledges these tensions but keeps it simple, the book after all intended to be a primer.

Bitcoin as a Force for Good

"Moral Money" is not superficial crypto advocacy but a serious look at the morality of our financial system. Whether bitcoin fulfills its promise as "the most moral money in human history" remains an open question. But the deeper point stands: monetary systems help shape behavior, distribute power, and support or undermine human dignity.

Years ago, these sorts of critiques of financialization and fiat currency would have been viewed as crank opinions. But I sense the culture has shifted. Bitcoin, and the conversation surrounding it, is in part to thank for this. In this sense, it has already succeeded.

Despite my small frustrations with institutional decision-making, it’s also true that ideas spread rapidly today. So I plan to hand this book to priests, bishops, and Catholic laymen I come in contact with to give a base level understanding of bitcoin as moral money. It's not totally unbelievable to think that our new American Pope Leo XIV could be given a copy of "Moral Money," that he could read it, and that we could legitimately see an encyclical that addresses these issues.

When the Church again sees money as a moral question - not just how we use it, but how it's created and distributed - bitcoin becomes a force for good in the world and the Church.