Bitcoin, Fiat, and Islamic Finance — Axiom \ stacker news ~bitcoin

For a little while, I've been following the Muslim Bitcoin community built around the Islamic concept that it usury is forbidden. Christians used to have a similar concept, but most handily discarded it long ago. Here, however, there is an excellent description of the reasoning behind this traditional stance:

Islamic Finance is remarkably astute on the real risks associated with entrepreneurship. It could even be said that it mandates humility in the face of economic uncertainty because the idea that you can know what is going to happen is not just impossible (in the Hayekian sense) or foolish (in terms of common sense) but is blasphemous. Only Allah knows all, and so to act as if you know what is going to happen is deemed morally wrong. Given you can’t know what is going to happen, you must make an informed decision and take responsibility for it. Hence, if you somehow stand to benefit no matter what happens, you are seen as having unacceptably disregarded a personal responsibility to effect positive change in the world. You don’t have to take on any particular responsibility, but if you want an uncertain reward, that should only follow from having skin in the game.

Adapting this essentially ethical insight to practical application sheds valuable light on the importance of riba, which is much more nuanced than its common (Western) characterisation as “interest:” If you lend to a business and you intend for your payback to come from interest payments following that business’s profitability but before disbursal to shareholders or reinvestment, you will get your payback no matter what happens. It doesn’t matter if the business does well or poorly; it doesn’t matter who is taking what responsibilities and making what decisions—you will be paid back.

This is the source of the violation as it seems impossible to avoid violating at least one of the tenets described above: Either you are claiming to know the future—you know you will be paid back because you know what is going to happen—or you are avoiding responsibility—you don’t know the future but it doesn’t matter because you will profit no matter what happens. This is perceived as “risk transfer:” Between those providing the capital for an enterprise, the risk is being transferred from one party to another rather than being shared.

Such principles are exceedingly difficult to keep in a financial system based on printing money. So, unsurprisingly, this Axiom paper proposes a solution: Bitcoin.

Check it out if you'd like to learn a little more about the interplay between Bitcoin and Islam.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @hasherstacker 5h

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @beyond_turbulence 5h

Thanks : https://beyondturbulence.blogspot.com/2025/10/bitcoin-islamic-finance-and-sufi.html?m=1

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 5h

'Luther was not alone in the sixteenth century in grounding his opposition to usury on the Gospels. Indeed, the following was reaffirmed at the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517) in the context of formally condoning montes pietatis, institutions led by Franciscans that lent to the poor at very low interest rates upon the security of pawned goods: “Our Lord, according to the testimony of Luke the evangelist, has bound us by a clear command that we must not expect to receive back anything beyond the principal when we grant a loan. For that is the proper definition of usury: namely, when one seeks to acquire gain or profit from a thing which produces nothing—without labor, without cost, and without risk.” (Note: these institutions, called “mounts of piety,” were originally established to protect the poor from exploitation by usurers outside the church who charged extortionate rates, and they permitted a modicum of interest solely to defray the cost of maintaining the institutions themselves. Conceived as a reform of lending practices, their guiding principle remained the welfare of the borrower rather than the profit of the lender. In continuity with earlier councils, this council likewise maintained the prohibition against profiting from interest and based this prohibition on both the Old and New Testaments. And even within its decrees, institutions were encouraged to lend entirely gratis, as this was acknowledged as more consistent with the Gospel—a practice made possible in some cases through charitable endowments. Yet for all their apparent good intentions, such institutions arguably opened the floodgates to usury and laid the groundwork for the eventual normalization of usury within the Roman church.) '

https://www.gottesdienst.org/gottesblog/2025/7/9/we-have-got-to-talk-about-usury-part-iii-the-new-testament

Usury is also prohibited under Christian doctrine both old and new testaments but that's been obfuscated and avoided as Jewish bankers have come to own our governments and narratives...