Featured loyal Bugle reader in this article @jimmysong
Houston, Texas – Joel Osteen will be the keynote speaker for the Thank God for Bitcoin Conference held in Nashville this July. The Texas based pastor and televangelist recently revealed that he'd been "Orange Pilled" by Jimmy Song who showed Osteen how to he could earn Bitcoin via the Lightning Network by uploading his sermons as podcast episodes to the Fountain App. Osteen also announced his church now allows members to tithe by scanning Lightning invoices displayed on the 67 foot Jumbotron in Osteen's megachurch as well as on the livestream version of his church's services.
Osteen is scheduled to address TGFB 2024 attendees on July 24, serving as the keynote speaker, kicking off the two day conference preceding the annual Bitcoin Conference which had previously been held in Miami every year since 2021. He is expected to share his Bitcoin story, why he decided to start accepting Bitcoin at his church, and how Christians can use Bitcoin to get rich like him.
Joel is also expected to participate in the highly anticipated panel "Love the JPEG'er, Hate the JPEG?" as the panel moderator while panelists Jimmy Song, Luke Dashjr, and Robert Breedlove debate the topic of Ordinals and whether or not Ordinals and the act of inscribing satoshis, is a sin.
Other notable events on the TGFB 2024 agenda include an interactive demonstration of TGFB co-author Lyle Pratt's Bitcoin powered AI phone screening service Vida and how churches can use Vida to screen phone calls, use AI to answer phone calls, and allow their members to pay for remote teleconference counseling and confession (if they're Catholic) with Bitcoin. Robert Breedlove will also be leading the Cold Plunge For Christ event where attendees will be able to try out ice baths during Robert Breedlove's scheduled speech. Organizers of TGFB 2024 hope the ice baths will make suffering through Breedlove's speech seem relatively more tolerable.
Finally, at the end of the two day conference, Jimmy Song is expected to detail the reasons why he is recommending Christian Bitcoiners and churches only use nodes running Bitcoin Core version 0.21.1, the version preceding the Taproot upgrade which enabled Ordinals, or older. Song published a snippet of his speech planned for the conference which likened version 0.21.1 to the King James version of the Bible and Taproot enabled versions of Bitcoin to the the New King James version, which is not approved by God.
Tickets for TGFB 2024 are still available on the group's website for $250.