Reformation and the Bitcoin Genesis

The importance of important dates

In the age of cathedrals, the voice of power sat on a gilded chair and spoke Latin into silence. Today, the throne is a server rack humming in some datacenter, its liturgies: cryptographic proofs.

This editorial contends that two moments: the excommunication of Martin Luther on January 3, 1521, and the mining of the Bitcoin Genesis Block on January 3, 2009, which mark bookends of the same story. That story is the struggle between concentrated authority and the unstoppable circulation of verifiable truth. Martin Luther’s death warrant came in a papal decree, and Bitcoin’s birth certificate was encoded with a newspaper headline about the world’s banks.

In both cases, a small line of text challenged an empire and offered ordinary people a new way to ledger their lives.

Scene One, 1521: Decet Romanum Pontificem

On January 3, 1521, Pope Leo X issued a bull titled Decet Romanum Pontificem. The document, sealed with lead, excommunicated the Augustinian friar Martin Luther from the Catholic Church. It was a legal instrument and a weapon. By casting Luther out, Leo X hoped to silence a monk who dared to circulate 95 Theses condemning indulgences: a practice by which priests monetized forgiveness. The papal bull followed a year of escalating pressure. In 1520, the pope had commanded Luther to recant under threat of excommunication. Luther did not. When Decet Romanum Pontificem arrived, it bore the full weight of ecclesiastical law: Luther was declared a heretic, stripped of sacraments and protection, and consigned to the flames if caught. In early modern Europe, excommunication was worse than social media de‑platforming; it severed one from community, from commerce, and even from salvation. 

Leo believed that by cutting off the man, he could contain the message.

But the thunder of Rome could not quiet the hum of Gutenberg’s printing presses, printing German-language Bibles and sermons. Luther’s theses and sermons had already been reproduced across Germany and beyond.

The printing press, perfected by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s, enabled the mass reproduction of texts. Between 1517 and 1525, Luther published over half a million works, according to worldhistory.org. Scholars note that his 95 Theses, which would previously have circulated among a few scholars, became a bestselling pamphlet within a year. The press converted his protest from a local dispute into a continental uprising. It created a new information economy in which ordinary people could read Scripture in their own language. Luther’s translation of the New Testament sold thousands of copies in two weeks and ultimately decentralized the power of the Church in just a few short years. 

Rome excommunicated a person; the press emancipated ideas, and the people showed the hierarchies that they can no longer control people because they could no longer control information!

Scene Two, Genesis: A counter‑decree in code

Almost five centuries later, another document appeared on January 3, except this time on a software stack. 

At block height 0 on the Bitcoin ledger, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto mined the Genesis Block of Bitcoin. Embedded in the block’s coinbase field was a line of text: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” The message was a headline from The Times of London describing the British government’s plan to bail out its banks during the global financial crisis. By choosing this headline, Nakamoto timestamped the block to prove Bitcoin had no premine, but it also signaled some disdain for the financial establishment. The Genesis Block created the first 50 bitcoins, but they are unspendable. It anchored a ledger that would grow by referencing it; every subsequent block is valid because Block 0 is valid, and so a revolution had begun!

The Genesis Block is the blueprint for a permissionless publication. Rather than a papal bull sealed by authority, this block was sealed by proof‑of‑work (PoW). Its hash begins a chain that anyone can verify, and no one can alter. While a papal bull requires faith in the issuer, the block invites inspection. The headline about the second bailout hints that Bitcoin is at least some kind of response to secrecy and cronyism in banking. Satoshi’s network verifies itself with cryptographic signatures, consensus, and transparency in the public square of the current era: the Internet. Like Luther’s theses nailed to a church door, the Genesis Block’s hidden message nails the ledger to an event in the real world, and it cries out in perpetuity because of its public audacity.

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The printing press parallel

Technology mediates power. Gutenberg’s press was the 16th‑century Internet. Luther’s revolt would have fizzled without the ability to copy and distribute his critiques cheaply. The press allowed people direct access to raw data (Scripture and tracts) so they could read without a priest’s intermediation. Ideas that once whispered through monasteries became broadsheets shouted in city squares. The press collapsed the cost of copying information and, in doing so, reconfigured authority. The Reformation was not only a theological dispute, but a communications revolution.

Bitcoin’s architecture offers a similar shift. Instead of a mechanical type, its medium is cryptographic timestamps and distributed consensus. The Bitcoin protocol permits anyone to broadcast a transaction, and miners, by expending electricity, order those transactions into a block. 

Once recorded, a block becomes a page in a ledger that cannot be retroactively edited without recalculating the enormous PoW. The ledger is public, append‑only, and auditable. In this sense, Bitcoin is a printing press for economic data. It democratizes the ability to record truth and verify it independently, undermining the need for trust in institutions. I argued in 2019 that the original Bitcoin protocol, preserved by BSV, is our generation’s printing press. It can accomplish for money and data what the printing press did for Scripture: decentralize authority and invite scrutiny, and it is even more true today!

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Bitcoin as auditable speech

Reducing Bitcoin to a price chart misses the point. Bitcoin is auditable speech. Each transaction is a signed message. Each block is a witness who testifies to the order of events. The Genesis Block, with its headline about bank bailouts, is a protest poem embedded in code. Auditable speech here means that any participant can run software to verify the entire history of transactions without trusting a priestly class of bankers or politicians. The ledger is not merely a database of debts and credits; it is a broadcast channel for economic, legal, and cultural records. 

But the Metanet (the vision of using Bitcoin as the backbone for global data) depends on scale: to record financial data, property records and communications for billions of people, the network must handle massive throughput.

This is where protocol choices matter. The original Bitcoin design envisioned unbounded block sizes and micropayments. In contrast, BTC’s dominant narrative since 2015 has been to keep blocks small and treat Bitcoin as a settlement layer. BTC’s base layer processes a block every ~10 minutes, handling 5–7 transactions per second. Such limited throughput leads to congestion and high fees. Although “layer‑2 solutions” like the Lightning Network aim to alleviate this, adoption and scalability are unproven even a decade after the idea was proposed, and the base layer remains narrow by design. During periods of demand, BTC fees have spiked to several hundreds of dollars or more, pushing ordinary users to the sidelines and censoring speech and commerce by de facto.

BSV continues to take a different path. By restoring and keeping the original protocol, BSV removes the block size limit and scales horizontally. BSV blockchain has processed hundreds of millions of transactions and boasts throughput measured in thousands of transactions per second, with fees measured in fractions of a cent. In 2023, the network recorded more than 125 million transactions, demonstrating that global scale is achievable on‑chain even before Teranode. This matters because a global communications network must accommodate micropayments, data storage, and contracts for everyone, not just the wealthy or speculative traders. Only a ledger with boundless scale can replace the banks’ opaque accounting and the state’s hidden debts, and as we enter the Teranode era, we should be cheering for free speech, free commerce and righting the wrongs of generations of censorship and financial engineering by hierarchical technocrats.

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The significance of dates: Marking time and pattern

Why emphasize the coincidence of January 3? Humans tell stories by anchoring meaning to dates. The Church uses liturgical calendars; nations celebrate independence days. Dates become mnemonic hooks for values and warnings. Satoshi’s choice to embed 3 January 2009 in code could be read as an arbitrary reference, but pattern recognition invites speculation.

Luther’s excommunication on January 3, 1521, came after he refused to recant his theses. The Genesis Block on January 3, 2009, is a refusal to recant the criticisms of centralized finance. Both are declarations against establishments that control access to salvation: one spiritual, the other financial.

Satoshi was a polymath who often signaled through symbols. While we cannot prove that he intentionally mirrored Luther’s date, we can note the resonance: a rebellion against gatekeepers born at the start of a year.

Symbolism matters because narratives shape adoption. Early Protestants celebrated the burning of indulgence receipts; early bitcoiners celebrate Genesis Day as a reminder that this network’s foundation is political as well as technical. The headline in the Genesis Block functions like Luther’s theses pinned to a door: a tangible artifact that calls out corruption. It is a covenant with future users: this system exists to end “too big to fail.” Unlike the papal bull, which tried to erase dissent, the Genesis block invites dissent by preserving it permanently.

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Call to action

The struggle between authority and reform did not end with Luther’s excommunication or with the Genesis Block. It is renewed whenever someone chooses to publish truth against the wishes of the powerful. If the printing press loosened Rome’s grip on salvation, Bitcoin can loosen Washington’s grip on governance, Wall Street’s grip on money, and Silicon Valley’s grip on data. But this outcome is not inevitable. It requires builders, miners and entrepreneurs to use Bitcoin as a tool for transparency, not just speculation. It requires merchants to demand verifiable records and citizens to insist on honest weights and measures. The biblical prophet Amos condemned “false balances” (Amos 8:5) or crooked scales used by merchants to cheat the poor. Our era’s false balances are algorithms that settle trades behind closed doors and ledgers that obfuscate liabilities. BSV offers a way to make measures honest again.

So, as we remember Genesis Day, remember two voices separated by five centuries. One was a monk who said “Here I stand”; the other was a pseudonymous coder who wrote a headline into software. Both confronted systems that claimed exclusive right to mediate truth. Both wielded new media to bypass gatekeepers. As readers, writers, coders and miners, we are heirs to their defiance. Let us build a world where excommunications and bailouts cannot bury the record, where truth is not a rumor but a provable sequence of hashes. In the battle between institutional power and auditable truth, choose to stand with those who open the ledger and let the light in.

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