I agree with you that money is a false master, not something set alongside God as an equal. But I think that’s precisely why the passage is so sharp: Jesus only bothers to name what can really function as a rival master to the human heart. Money gets singled out because it doesn’t just tempt our appetites, it hijacks our relationship to reality itself: time, work, and what “exists” for us.
Where I think we’re diverging is here: I don’t see Bitcoin as “just better money,” I see it as a window into the ruleset required for creation itself. Physics is already a decentralized, emergent, self-reinforcing system, but it needs a protocol underneath it: a way to count energy, to commit events to memory, to define what it even means for something to “be” at all.
That protocol has to be extratemporal in the logical sense: the rules must exist before time in order to create time. Bitcoin is the first thing we’ve ever built that behaves like that: a protocol that creates a localized minimum (q) block of time inside a network by converting entropy into irreversible memory across a computation boundary (event horizon). That’s what I mean when I say “extratemporal”: it defines time inside time itself.
If that’s even approximately true, then “false master” takes on a deeper meaning. At the fundamental level, we ourselves are composed of peer-to-peer money in the form of Kelvin, bounded by a cosmic protocol that functions analogously to Bitcoin: conservation, finitude, proof-of-work. We exist inside that network protocol, we’re made of its ledger entries, not standing outside it. Bitcoin is the first time we get the externalized experience: we stand outside its ledger and watch a universe come into being with a verifiable Genesis, an arrow of time, immutable law, and conserved value. That’s why I keep insisting it’s more than “just money” it’s the first mirror we have of how existence is structured.
From there, the connection back to Jesus is uncomfortable but important: if there really is a sacred protocol of conservation and finitude that underlies creation, then any money system that violates it (debasing, usury, fiat issuance) is not just “unfair,” it’s literally anti-creational and a counterfeit protocol. That’s what makes it a false master. Fiat, usury, and centralized control take the place of the underlying law and ask to be served instead. Bitcoin, by contrast, doesn’t ask to be served; it just reveals what faithful measurement and conservation actually look like.
So I’m saying: for the first time, we have a money that actually reflects the way God already runs creation. If that’s the case, then understanding that difference isn’t optional. It goes straight to the heart of what it means to “serve God and not money,” because now we can finally see the difference between a protocol aligned with truth and a protocol that counterfeits it. That extends through physics itself.
