A Bitcoin transaction is a global speech act that means, roughly, I am provably entitled to this portion, x, of the money supply, and am now transferring it to somebody else, in a language that everybody remembers forever and which can’t be used to lie.

Who initiated this transfer, what amount of Bitcoin did they send, what metadata did they attach to the transaction, and when did they send it? That information is recorded in the blockchain and sufficient to give a bare bones history of the entire Bitcoin economy since 2009. And if you sum up that entire history to the present day, you also get th

That Bitcoin can potentially be considered concordant with the teachings of Islamic finance is an insight we owe to conversation with Saifedean Ammous. What we mean by this is since bitcoin is a digital bearer asset and not a debt instrument, its natural state of safe custody is outside financial institutions.