Faith in the Capital Market - The Essence and Core Value of Crypto Assets

Original Title: Belief in the Capital Market - The Essence and Core Value of Crypto Assets

Original author: Rhythm BlockBeats

Original source:

Reprint: Mars Finance

A year ago, I participated in a debate on Twitter Space, “Is Bitcoin's development today based on faith or capital manipulation?” Deep down, I believed this debate should not have happened, and I even fell into deep frustration for a period of time after the debate.

I have always believed that the core value of the Crypto Assets industry is consensus and culture, or in other words, faith. When I resigned from my job in the traditional industry 4 years ago and fully immersed myself in this industry, I held this mindset. Along with the successes and failures of trading, my emotions have fluctuated countless times, but my belief has never changed.

The year 2025 has been more disappointing for Crypto Assets players. As this year is about to pass, we still have not been able to solve the biggest problem facing the current Crypto Assets market - narrative failure and loss of faith.

As an ordinary practitioner in the Crypto Assets industry, although my work is very mundane, over the past 4 years, I have seen and thought about some things, and I have always had a vague feeling that one day, I would systematically write these thoughts into an article. Now is the time.

Bitcoin is a modern religion.

Christianity has Jesus, Buddhism has Siddhartha Gautama, Islam has Muhammad, Bitcoin has Satoshi Nakamoto.

Christianity has the “Bible”, Buddhism has the “Sutra”, Islam has the “Quran”, and Bitcoin has “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”.

If we conduct a more detailed comparison, we will find that Bitcoin shares many similarities with traditional religions beyond the aspects mentioned above. For example, Bitcoin has its own doctrines (the modern financial order will eventually collapse, and Bitcoin will become the Ark of Noah when the end of the modern financial order arrives), its own religious rituals (mining and HODL), has experienced divisions during its development, and has also become a tool used by governments for specific purposes after reaching a certain scale, among other things.

But if we refer to Bitcoin as a “modern religion,” we must discuss its differences from traditional religions.

First of all, the term “decentralization” has developed in the current Crypto Assets industry and even carries a hint of irony, but it is undoubtedly the most fundamental characteristic of the modern religion represented by Bitcoin. What I emphasize here is not the degree of decentralization in the operation of a blockchain network, but whether “the cohesion of consensus is a decentralized process.”

The “genius” Satoshi Nakamoto of Bitcoin chose “self-exile”, abandoning his own authority to create a brand new world. Bitcoin does not have a symbolic central authority god, nor does it have an individual or entity that actually possesses divine power; it grows and thrives in a bottom-up manner, contrary to traditional religions. The Bitcoin white paper, along with the line in the genesis block that states “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”, has never been altered. As long as you are interested, you can interpret them in any way you wish.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the most human-like “creator deity”, but also the least human-like, because he exhibits non-human moral standards, or rather, ideal pursuits. Satoshi Nakamoto possesses not only Bitcoin worth billions of dollars but also the ability to destroy this religion with a single hand, as if he has a button that could destroy the world at his disposal, yet he just vanished. If you think deeper, Bitcoin has developed for so many years, and the followers of Bitcoin have believed that Satoshi Nakamoto will always protect the world he created. Even today, as governments around the world have started to believe, you will realize how incredible all of this is.

Secondly, the “Internet” allows Bitcoin to attract followers without relying on face-to-face preaching, conquest through war, or immigration like traditional religions. The Internet not only makes the dissemination of Bitcoin non-linear and non-geographical like traditional religions, but also gives Bitcoin a modern infectious appeal, such as meme culture, to attract a new generation of young people.

Of course, there are “dedication and return,” as well as “division and expansion.” These two points are very important, as they determine that modern religion is essentially a form of “faith capital market.”

Believe in the Capital Market

If you are a Bitcoin believer, you do not need to fast or practice austerities, you just need to run a Bitcoin full node or hold Bitcoin.

When your faith in Bitcoin is challenged, whether by the block size debate or smart contract public chains like Ethereum and Solana, you need not engage in a holy war; you still only need to run a full Bitcoin node or hold Bitcoin.

Whether running a Bitcoin full node or holding Bitcoin, it can be seen as a religious ritual of the Bitcoin religion. This religious ritual does not promise you the hope of a better life, or grant you the longing for a fulfilled afterlife, but rather delivers tangible material and spiritual returns to the believers through price performance.

Similarly, whether it is the dispute over large and small blocks or the emergence of new public chains like Ethereum and Solana, the various debates ultimately lead to the continuous increase in the total market value of Crypto Assets. In the world of Crypto Assets, the conflict of beliefs no longer leads to physical annihilation and spiritual conquest; instead, it presents a situation completely opposite to that of traditional religions—traditional religions conflict to explain the world, ultimately dividing it. The conflicts in Crypto Assets, however, are like the sparks that create the world, akin to the universe expanding infinitely after the Big Bang, growing larger and more prosperous.

The universe is vast, accommodating countless Earths. The Capital Market is also vast, accommodating countless tokenized beliefs.

Bitcoin is certainly a specific modern religion. However, from the perspective of having pioneered the “faith in the Capital Market”, its significance far exceeds that of a specific modern religion, which I refer to as the “religion without a religion”. As Bitcoin has developed to today, it has gone through a process of secularization similar to traditional religions, specifically reflected in the religious rituals from running a Bitcoin full node, to HODL, and now almost no crypto players emphasize its specific meaning, but instead, it quietly occupies the apex of the crypto assets market like a totem. Just as Christmas in today's world is no longer a Christian holiday, we enjoy Christmas trees, Christmas gifts, and the atmosphere of Christmas, putting on Santa hats for our social media profile pictures during the holiday, but we may not be Christians.

You could say that Bitcoin is a Crypto Asset because if Bitcoin collapses, the Crypto Asset market will cease to exist. The value of all Crypto Assets is fundamentally based on the value of Bitcoin. However, I am not very willing to define Bitcoin this way—what is the core value of Bitcoin? Digital gold? Tokenized energy? Fiat killer? In my view, the core value of Bitcoin is that it establishes a modern form of religion, which is the belief in the Capital Market.

Secularization

Whether it's traditional religions or Bitcoin, secularization is a double-edged sword.

Taking Christmas as an example, the global commercial value brought by Christmas (such as holiday retail, gifts, travel, decorations, and related consumption) has significantly exceeded the commercial value of traditional Christian institutions (such as donations from worshippers, church tickets, sales, and related income). According to estimates from Statista and the National Retail Federation (NRF), the total holiday retail sales in the United States for 2024 are expected to be around $973 billion, with a forecast to break $1 trillion for the first time in 2025. This is just the data for the U.S. market, which accounts for about 40-50% of global Christmas consumption.

In contrast, the traditional “commercial value” of Christianity includes donations from believers (tithes, offerings), church tickets (such as those for tourist attraction churches), sales (such as books, souvenirs), and related income. According to the “Global Christianity Status 2024” report from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, the total amounts to approximately $1.304 trillion.

If we set aside the Christian-related tourist attractions and souvenirs, the contributions from non-Christians still result in a discount on this $1.304 trillion.

Secularization has transformed Christmas from a strictly religious holiday into a global cultural phenomenon, which has certainly broadened the influence of Christianity to some extent, but has also diluted its religious core.

Bitcoin and the entire belief Capital Market it has created are the same. Just as many people around the world see Christmas merely as a day of joy, more and more Crypto Assets market participants are also flooding in solely for speculation.

This is not only a matter of right or wrong, but also an unstoppable inevitable process. However, the issue we want to point out here is that celebrating Christmas has not shaken the faith of traditional Christians, but has the massive wave of speculation shaken the faith of traditional Bitcoin believers?

Similarly, the festive atmosphere of Christmas does not cause Christians to doubt their faith, while the speculative atmosphere of the Crypto Assets market has led Crypto Assets believers to feel nihilism and frustration. The recent viral tweet “I wasted 8 years of my life in the Crypto Assets industry” is one of the best proofs of this.

Where is the problem?

myth

I dare not jump to conclusions on this issue easily. From the intuitive perspective of a crypto player, I would cautiously say that it might be the case, but it's more likely that Bitcoin has developed too quickly, and the fundamental base of Bitcoin faith itself is much smaller compared to traditional religions.

More importantly, the Crypto Assets industry has gone too far on the “technological myth”. For a long time, both industry practitioners and speculators have been repeatedly seeking the answer to one question - “What else can blockchain technology be used for?” Practitioners use this to determine their entrepreneurial direction, while speculators use it to identify their speculative targets. When everyone is pursuing a faster, more efficient, and more applicable blockchain, it is undoubtedly self-harm.

If the Crypto Assets industry is just the second Nasdaq, then it's merely wasting money on doing something redundant. Moreover, wasting money is just a trivial matter; the real harm lies in the dilution of the understanding of the essence of “faith in the Capital Market” and the depletion of faith itself.

Without Christianity, there would be no popular culture Christmas. Without a Capital Market forged by faith, there would be no paradise for entrepreneurs and speculators. If we ignore this obvious causal relationship, we will naturally keep questioning, “What new narrative do we need to create to attract more people into the Crypto Assets market?”

Whether it is traditional religions or Crypto Assets, one inevitably has to ponder this question – “In different eras, how should one attract young people with different cultural preferences?” Bitcoin has provided a new answer, astonishing traditional religions in less than 20 years. Now, it is time for Bitcoin and the entire Crypto Assets industry to face this challenge.

Savior

meme coin is the savior of the Crypto Assets industry.

First of all, the foundation of believing in the Capital Market is Bitcoin, but that does not mean we need to zealously promote Bitcoin maximalism again. The most fundamentalist and fanatical existences in religion are often niche; whether it is the spirit of cypherpunk or the apocalyptic predictions that traditional finance will eventually collapse, the novelty it brings to the new generation of young people is gradually declining and inherently has a high threshold of understanding.

To put it another way, to revitalize Bitcoin as a specific religion actually underestimates Bitcoin, because what we really want to revitalize is a “religion without a religion”. It is a cognition that allows each person's belief to coalesce in the modern world through the internet in the Crypto Assets market, not only to gain material wealth but also to unleash boundless power.

The core value of Bitcoin is that “we both believe it has value.” This may seem like a cliché, but in reality, it is a great decentralization of the power to explain value. You and I can casually take a piece of paper and write “worth a gram of gold,” but we have no way to convince anyone to accept its value, with no value anchor or central authority backing it. Starting from zero, it has crossed numerous barriers of language, culture, and geography, and even ultimately received recognition from institutions and governments. This greatness is greatly underestimated by the public.

From ancient times to the present, individual consciousness has always been extremely weak and can be trampled at will, to the extent that we underestimate our value as independent and living individuals, the value of each of our thoughts. In fact, the most abundant resources in this world have been consumed by wars—wars that invade our consciousness. Political elections, advertising and public relations, and even some of the most basic common sense education we believe in—all of these consume enormous amounts of money, just to ultimately make you and me perceive something as good or bad.

The internet is great; it allows our ideas to cross everything and facilitates communication and collision around the clock without interruption. Crypto Assets are great; they allow us to see very specifically what we can achieve when we mutually understand each other's thoughts, reach consensus, and form enormous scales with exponential growth.

The greatness of crypto assets is not only underestimated but even inverted. The technology of house construction is indeed great, but the core value of a house is to provide people with a place to live. “A peer-to-peer electronic cash system” is certainly a genius idea, but its core value lies in the fact that everyone recognizes Bitcoin as something that indeed holds value and can be used as electronic cash like currency. For many years, we have created countless so-called faster, more efficient, and more effective blockchains beyond Bitcoin, and we fantasize that this means more living people will enter this market.

It's like we think that, setting aside religion, the phenomenon of Christmas can be rapidly and widely replicated. We delude ourselves into believing that since we have a sword in our hands, we can become the unrivaled swordsman in the world, but in reality, we not only have no sword in our hands, but there is also no sword in our hearts.

Secondly, meme coins have never truly gone through a complete and mature bull market cycle. To this day, many people still believe that the value of meme coins lies in the crazy speculation that has no value. Since last year, the popularity of pump.fun and Trump's coin issuance have further polluted the true definition of “attention tokens” in relation to real meme coins.

What is a true meme coin? In fact, I don't even like the term “meme coin”. The reason it exists is that early on, $DOGE and $SHIB achieved great success despite being considered useless by people. We always tend to look for reasons after success, but overlook the value of belief. So, well, their success is attributed to that smiling dog image having a huge influence worldwide, so let's call it a “meme coin”. Alright, let's continue to transport classic internet meme culture symbols, Pepe, Wojak, Joe…

Here, I have to pay tribute to Murad, who was the first to systematically explain what “meme coins” are, propose a quantifiable quality evaluation standard, and deliver a speech on a sufficiently large stage. His “meme coin supercycle” theory has gained enough influence in the crypto assets community.

He has insight into a very crucial point - memes are merely syntactic sugar for faith assets. True faith assets must be like Bitcoin, clearly allowing people to understand its doctrine, know what we are truly facing, what we need to change, and how we can influence or even change this world.

So, $SPX is good, as it is very clear, clearly telling people that we want to mock traditional finance by surpassing the actual value of the S&P 500. So, $NEET is good, as it is very clear, clearly telling people that the nine-to-five rat race is just a scam, and we want to awaken more people to break free from the shackles of work.

Just like Bitcoin believers undergo rigorous training during the ups and downs of prices, forging a true belief asset is by no means an easy task. In this process, new religions beyond Bitcoin not only need to look inward to find a clear positioning and meaning, and the idea of uniting and consolidating a large community, but also continuously expand their influence outward. This is destined to be a long process, and not every small progress will be reflected in the price.

Meme coin is the savior of the crypto assets industry. This is said because when everyone realizes that “meme coin” is actually just a misleading term that does not touch the essence, and “faith assets” shine brightly in the crypto assets market once again, people will marvel, “Meme coin is back!” In fact, “faith assets” are the essence of this market. I won't say it is indispensable, as it exists naturally.

Conclusion

The things that the world cares about are changing every year, every month, every day, and even every hour. We cannot expect that Crypto Assets will always be one of the most关注的事物 in the world. If we lose faith, then this industry should also die.

Greatness cannot be planned; we can never know what will cause the next Crypto Assets to become the world's top trending topic again. This is a form of苦修. Bitcoin is a sociological model, a cyber religion, a form of religion. If we forget this, the entire Crypto Assets industry is merely a “business” based on Bitcoin consensus. And what business people want is never the continuous strengthening of consensus, but the perpetual increase of income.

I cannot change anything, nor do I intend to change anything, but I will uphold my beliefs, believing in the Capital Market.