UC Berkeley

Abstract This article examines how bitcoin has acquired religious significance among many techno-libertarians, who hold it as a symbol promising deliverance from a fallen world. Drawing on both participant observation at bitcoin meetups and the 2023 Bitcoin Conference, as well as digital ethnography on X, the article presents a thick description of how bitcoiners construct specific beliefs about the world and their place in it, as well as ritual practices that vivify these beliefs and sanctify those who hold them. These beliefs and practices constitute bitcoin, in turn, as a distinct moral community in which bitcoin is symbolized as an instrument of salvation from a failing institutional order. This Durkheimian analysis contributes to understanding how money in modern society carries with it religious meanings about the world and human history. And it also contributes to an understanding of the specific ideological formation driving techno-libertarianism as an ascendant political interest today.