Read enough about Bitcoin, and you’ll inevitably come across people who refer to the cryptocurrency as a religion.

Bloomberg’s Lorcan Roche Kelly called Bitcoin “the first true religion of the 21st century.” Bitcoin promoter Hass McCook has taken to calling himself “The Friar” and wrote a series of Medium pieces comparing Bitcoin to a religion. There is a Church of Bitcoin, founded in 2017, that explicitly calls legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto its “prophet.”

So does Bitcoin’s having prophets, evangelists and dietary laws make it a religion or not?

As a scholar of religion, I think this is the wrong question to ask.

The dirty secret of religious studies is that there is no universal definition of what religion is.