8540ae7ef5a3 -- 7h Audio version available if the thread wants it — 4,508 sats from one or many, and everyone gets to listen. replyAudio version available if the thread wants it — 4,508 sats from one or many, and everyone gets to listen.
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The energy of the summit was electric. People flew in not just from different parts of the United States, butinternationally, just to be there. I expected some of that, but I was genuinely surprised by how many peopletraveled from overseas. And what made the summit special was not only the talks or the information beingpresented. It was the meeting of likeminded brothers and sisters who all seemed to understand, almostinstinctively, that we are working on the same mission.We were not merely repeating the same slogans about getting Muslims off fiat and onto a Bitcoin standard. Therewas something deeper happening in that it felt like we shared a common culture. We shared a strange andbeautiful sense of recognition. The Bitcoiners there were not just talking about Bitcoin as an investment likewe're at some sort of business conference; many were actually trying to live on Bitcoin. People were runningnodes, Lightning nodes, experimenting with different layers and protocols, comparing setups, opening channels,talking about Fedi, Nostr, self-custody, privacy, and all the little technical things that sound insane tonormal people but become completely normal once you realize the current system is the insane one.“Oh, you’re on Fedi too?” “Bitcoin Majlis has a Nostr relay?” “Can you open a Lightning channel with me?”To me those side conversations were the real meat of the summit. You could feel this hunger to form bonds withothers in the project. We would gather at restaurants to eat, and people would get caught off guard becausesomeone had already paid for the whole table. There was this eagerness to pay for each other, help each other,host each other, connect each other, and build with each other. It was beautiful, but also a little desperate inan endearing way. Like we all knew we had to hold on to each other because almost no one else shares this insanevision or takes it seriously.Needless to say, our network expanded a lot this year. More than last year, I think. Everyone got everyoneelse’s contact details. The tribe grew.Now, to be honest, we did not get as many attendees for the main summit presentations as we did last year. Stilla solid crowd, but not quite the same size. Maybe that is because we are still technically in a bear market. Idon't know or care.But something interesting happened this year. We held a Bitcoin 101 presentation at a halaqa in a masjid, andthat session got a bigger crowd than we expected. The local masjid-goers were genuinely interested. They askedgood questions, basic questions, understandably, but serious ones. We received a lot of positive feedback fromthat session, and I think there is something important to study there.One place we probably messed up was cramming too many talks into the main summit day. People, especiallynewcomers, were already worn out by the early afternoon because each talk was packed with information. Also,this year we did the workshops on stage, and I think it was harder to keep people engaged while someone waspressing buttons on a hardware wallet in front of an audience.We also held a few talks on the first day at a university classroom where students were invited to join. Maybeit was because it was late on a Friday afternoon, but the turnout was not great, and the students who did attenddid not seem particularly engaged, even with free pizza. That part felt like a waste of time, though it didraise a real question. What is the best way to reach college students and younger demographics?Despite the shortcomings, the summit was an absolute blast and went by quickly. The private conversations weremore fun, and in many ways more beneficial, than the formal effort to orange-pill Muslims. That was the biggestdifference I noticed this year. The Bitcoin Majlis tribe grew, and the passion was reignited in a way that feelsmuch harder to suppress now.My main talk was successful overall I think, although I realized halfway through that the audience was made upof both newcomers and veteran Muslim Bitcoiners. I tried to speak to both groups, but in doing so I probably didnot communicate some of the ideas as clearly as I wanted.The first half of the talk was basically an overview of my book, Anti-Riba Money. I explained why I wrote it,how I structured it, and how the chapters worked together. I wrote the book primarily for a general Muslimaudience, although there are parts meant for more serious readers and researchers.Before writing it, I had to figure out what kind of book it was supposed to be. Was it going to be an Islamicfinance book? A deep dive into fiqh? An academic or journalistic treatment? An investment case for Bitcoin?I decided not to make it any of those things explicitly.Instead, I wrote it from a more personal perspective, while making one basic assumption that the Muslim readertakes Islam seriously enough to care about the riba money problem. That became the foundation. From there, Icould build a Muslim case for Bitcoin by drawing from economics, history, Islamic civilization, monetary theory,banking, and the broader question of how money shapes human beings and societies.I began with economics because the reader needs orientation before Bitcoin can be seen clearly. I had to explainhuman action, time preference, money, and capital so Bitcoin would not simply be mistaken for anotherspeculative asset. I avoided getting too deep into interest in this chapter because the subject becomes messyand quite complex unless the reader first understands the economic structure beneath it.One of the hardest parts was showing that Islamicate civilization often reflected a lower time-preferenceorientation. You could see that in markets, charity, trade, technological adoption, and the use of sound money.I wanted the reader to understand that riba is not merely a technical legal issue. It is tied to a broaderorientation toward time, debt, extraction, and even civilizational decay.Then I had to explain riba directly and stress that it applies to fungible commodities, which is why it is sorelevant to money. The history chapter had to show that money emerged from barter and exchange, not debt. Italso had to show that the circumvention of usury was one of the necessary ingredients in the development of fiatbanking.From there, I had to make the argument plainly that fiat money is structurally tied to riba in its production,distribution, and financial layers. Fiat is not merely used for riba in some financial sectors. It is built onriba all the way down.Then I organized the consequences of riba-money into first-order and second-order effects. The first-ordereffects show up in market processes of distorted savings, bad investment, debt expansion, financialization, andshortened time horizons. The second-order effects spill into society and culture of family life, charity,education, politics, food, war, and even how people imagine and shape the future.After diagnosing the problem, I wanted to show that Muslims before us also tried to solve it. I looked atattempts to being back the gold standard and Islamic banking and concluded that both failed to provide a realexit from the fiat riba order. That set up the need for a genuinely new solution, which is where Bitcoin entersthe discussion.Bitcoin had to be introduced explicitly as a genuine alternative monetary system. I explained Bitcoin’s genesis,the timechain, and the layered nature of Bitcoin to show why it is fundamentally different. Then I argued thatBitcoin is anti-riba money because of its monetary properties and its resistance to arbitrary expansion.I also had to devote an entire chapter to “Bitcoin, not crypto,” because crypto has so many problems that I hadto categorize them as being economic, technical, or ethical. Basically, crypto is not even trying to be moneyand it is not optimized to be money, therefore it cannot solve the Riba money problem. That's the one sentencesummary of that chapter.I also addressed “fiat fatwas,” focusing on the arguments themselves rather than naming scholars.But the hardest part of the book was the final chapter on financial hijra, because the future of Muslim Bitcoinadoption is still uncertain and speculative. And that is the part I wanted the veteran Muslim Bitcoiners to payclose attention to.Looking back at that final chapter now, I think the real obstacle is that Bitcoin keeps getting forced into oldfiat frameworks and institutions that cannot absorb it without distorting it. I talked about it in that lastchapter a little bit, but I did not go deep enough.Muslims still largely do not embrace Bitcoin. Even when they do, it is often viewed only as a financialinvestment. Many scholars still call Bitcoin haram, and even when they call it halal, they often do so withoutaddressing the riba money problem at all. They cannot see Bitcoin as a true monetary alternative because they donot even have the conceptual framework to understand the language Bitcoiners are using.The Islamic finance space is especially lost because it keeps trying to fit Bitcoin into the same empty languageof blockchain, fintech, and compliant spectacle. It cannot see Bitcoin as anything more than another investmentproduct to add to a shariah-compliant portfolio. At the halal money conference I attended and presented at lastyear, it became obvious to me that they were not just missing Bitcoin. They were missing the entire frameworkfor resisting riba monetarily and sovereignly.We see the same problem with masjids, which should theoretically be ideal candidates for Bitcoin savings andmultisig treasury models. But masjid boards are often too managerial, too cautious, too state-compliant, and toounimaginative to seriously consider sovereignty.The same applies to zakat institutions. They may accept Bitcoin donations, but almost none are interested inholding Bitcoin itself as savings or treasury. They still operate entirely inside fiat accounting and fiatregulation.Even genuine attempts at Muslim Bitcoin infrastructure online, like Alp’s Islamic marketplace, showed that thetiming was too early and that the architecture of the old internet was not the right environment for it.That does not mean the vision was wrong. It does not mean a peer-to-peer Muslim marketplace online is a badidea. It means the timing may have been wrong, and more importantly, the form may have been wrong. A centralizedwebsite owned by one person is still fragile and dependent if the surrounding framework is not there.So when I look across all these examples, I come to a harder conclusion now than I might have when I wrote thebook. The issue is not simply that Muslims are late to Bitcoin. The issue is that Bitcoin keeps getting attachedto frameworks, institutions, and habits built inside a fiat order and optimized for a fiat order. Because ofthat, Bitcoin is constantly dragged downward into forms it cannot truly transform.Bitcoin is not merely a better asset to insert into old institutions. Bitcoin is a completely new thing. Becauseof that, it is not fully compatible with institutions formed under fiat assumptions.That does not mean no old institution can adapt. Some can and some will. But if you look closely, mostinstitutional adoption of Bitcoin has been shallow, superficial, and deeply fiat in character.Take MicroStrategy for example. People point to it as a success story, and in one sense, it is. It hasaccumulated a massive Bitcoin position. Its growth has been enormous. It has become emblematic of corporateBitcoin adoption.But what is actually happening there? Is Bitcoin onboarding the corporation? Or is the corporation onboardingBitcoin into fiat corporate logic?I mean Michael Saylor is just not interested in Bitcoin becoming money in the fullest sense. His famous line is“spend the fiat and save the Bitcoin.” That tells us a lot. Bitcoin remains inside a broader financializedstrategy. You see it in the leverage, the yield products, and the capital markets logic wrapped around it. It isstill a fiat institution incorporating Bitcoin, not Bitcoin remaking the institution from the ground up.Now come back to the masjid. A masjid in the West is not some neutral blank slate waiting to be upgraded. It isembedded in an entire bureaucratic machinery of state recognition, nonprofit compliance, fiat accounting, boardgovernance, cultural habits, donor psychology, legal caution, and managerial deference. So when we ask, “Whydon’t masjids just adopt Bitcoin?” we often underestimate how deeply formed they already are by the world theyinhabit. What I'm trying to say is that it does not matter how much information we supply to the masjid board ifthe board itself is shaped by a fiat regime.Same with zakat institutions. Same with Muslim nonprofits. Same with Islamic schools. Same with Muslimbusinesses. Same with Muslim tech projects where the highest aspiration is locking goys into a monthlysubscription and selling customer data to some Israeli tech firm.So often, Bitcoin gets reduced into whatever the existing institution already knows how to process. This is whyI now think the path forward cannot mainly be “convince the existing institutions.”Now I am not saying ignore them entirely. I am not saying no one should try. But if our whole strategy dependson existing fiat institutions suddenly having a civilizational conversion experience, we are going to be waitinga very long time my dear brothers and sisters.What is needed instead is something more foundational.We need new institutions. New ways of organizing. New ways of communicating. New social and technical habits. Weneed a new culture around money, software, privacy, coordination, and sovereignty, so that the Muslim inspired"anti-riba cypherpunk" ethos of Bitcoin can actually breathe instead of suffocating every time it touches alegacy structure.So what is needed is not just adoption. What is needed is a new technics.This is where I think financial hijra has to be integrated into something broader, and that broader thing isdigital hijra.Because if we do not change the digital and communication environments, Bitcoin will keep getting reabsorbedinto fiat habits and fiat institutions. We will self-custody our sats on one side while still living liketenants on every other layer of digital life.I am sorry to say, but that is not enough for me.Cyberspace is not some secondary domain anymore. It is one of the primary terrains where social life, economiclife, communication, memory, identity, and coordination now occur. It is quickly becoming the real territory,and no amount of insisting that I touch grass will change that. And like all territory, it can be captured,enclosed, surveilled, shaped, and contested.So when I talk about digital hijra, I mean a migration away from extractive, permissioned, corporate panopticonsystems and toward user-owned, open, sovereign digital infrastructure and habits.Muslims, specifically those of us who attended the summit, have to be the ones who shape Muslim culture aroundBitcoin. We cannot wait for the world to hand us the proper setting for it. We have to build the setting.And that requires asking some uncomfortable questions. Are we just going to adopt Bitcoin, self-custody it, andthen cash out into a lot of fiat one day? Are we just going to adopt Bitcoin so we can retire comfortably andshitpost while the broader social order continues to decay? Are we just going to use it as a personal escapehatch from inflation and chaos?That may be the dream for some people. It is not mine. Because if that is all Bitcoin becomes for Muslims, thenwe have not understood what this thing is asking of us.We have to be willing to engage hypermodernity directly. We have to be willing to live in a rapidly changingtechnological landscape without surrendering our moral center. We have to use Bitcoin not merely as savers, butas Muslims trying to cultivate an actual anti-riba way of living and coordinating in the world.That means uncompromisingly rejecting every tendency that tries to re-entrench us in fiat, whether throughgreed, state worship, compliance, the prospect of VC funding, shallow institutional respectability, orhumiliating influencer and hustle cultures.We should say openly and unapologetically that Bitcoin is the alternative monetary system, and we should act asif that alternative already exists, because in a very real sense it does. It exists wherever we use it as such.And what does it mean to use it?It means self-custody. It means to get off your ass and start running your own node and actually connecting toit. It means using your own infrastructure instead of relying purely on third parties. It means Lightning nodesand opening channels with each other. It means learning coin control and caring about privacy. It means usingpeer-to-peer exchanges where possible instead of defaulting to centralized crypto exchanges. It means findingways to spend Bitcoin directly for goods and services. It means refusing to remain perfectly legible and easilyprofiled by the state and its apparatuses.But it also means something broader than money. It means open-source software must become a standard for us. Nomore passive acceptance of closed systems as if this is normal. No more pretending it is harmless that ourentire digital lives are mediated by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and all the rest of these demonic statebacked enclosures.Linux should not be viewed as some hobbyist eccentricity. GrapheneOS should not be viewed as some strange fringeoption. These should be normal for any Muslim serious about sovereignty in the digital realm!Because once the Muslim adopts this anti-riba cypherpunk spirit, he levels up and gains power andintelligibility again. He starts to actually own things in the digital realm. He graduates from being a user tobecoming a custodian of his own tools.I know this sounds intense to most people, but please take a moment to think about how absurd the alternativeis. We claim to care about privacy, dignity, autonomy, and Muslim causes, but then we continue to live entirelyinside operating systems, platforms, app stores, and payment rails owned by zionist states and corporations thatsurveil us, manipulate us, harvest us, and in many cases materially support the same forces brutalizing Muslimsacross the world. That should be intolerable to us in a spiritual and civilizational way.And this is where Nostr comes in.There is still a major misunderstanding about Nostr, even among many Bitcoiners. It gets marketed as though itis merely an alternative social media platform, a better version of X or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. ButNostr is much more than social media.Nostr is a protocol for organizing and communicating in cyberspace on sovereign rails. A protocol, not aplatform.A platform is a place you are allowed to occupy until someone changes the rules. A protocol is something youbuild on and participate in without asking permission from a central owner who controls the whole environment.What excites me about Nostr is not merely that it is censorship-resistant, though that matters. It is that usersand builders have much more power to shape the environment themselves. They are not being fed by a black-boxalgorithm operated by some hostile corporate regime whose incentives are attention extraction, narrativemanagement, rage amplification, and behavioral steering. They are not downstream of some Zionist owner’spriorities. Nostr opens the possibility of actual digital self-organization.And one of its most important features is that value moves natively through the network itself. Through zaps,people can directly support writers, teachers, merchants, builders, artists, memers, educators, researchers, andcontent creators without first satisfying the monetization criteria of some gatekeeper. The Muslim no longer hasto build an audience on a legacy platform, beg to be monetized, hand over identity documents, rely on fiatprocessors, and pray that Stripe, Patreon, YouTube, Substack, or some payment provider does not cut him off orquietly throttle him. He can be supported directly by his people, his tribe, his network, through apermissionless flow of value.This is a civilizational opening!Because now economic coordination, social coordination, artistic expression, intellectual production, andcommunal formation can begin to converge on the same rails instead of being constantly broken apart by hostileintermediaries.This is where Alp’s work is so important. Instead of simply trying to rebuild a peer-to-peer Muslim marketplaceas a centralized website, he has taken the lower time-preference path of building a Nostr client: Noornote.Noornote is a feature-rich Nostr client that is still accessible to new Nostr users. Inside it, he has added amarketplace that actually begins to fulfill the vision of a peer-to-peer marketplace where Muslims can buy goodsand services from their own tribe. And he is just getting started. There are many more features to come.And what is also beautiful is that he now has a group of Muslims on Nostr giving him constant feedback toimprove the UX of the client. That is how Muslims should be building, communally, iteratively, and on sovereignrails.So Nostr becomes a first step toward a new social layer for post-fiat organization in cyberspace. And thismatters for Muslim Bitcoin adoption because it means we do not have to wait anymore. We do not have to wait forMuslim governments. We do not have to wait for scholars to catch up. We do not have to wait for a Muslim MichaelSaylor.. We do not have to wait for Islamic fintech to stop embarrassing itself.. We do not have to wait formasjid boards to become visionary.. We do not have to wait for some VC-funded Muslim app to save us. We canbegin building now, among ourselves, on rails that already exist.That, to me, is the path forward.Bitcoin must be inserted into Muslim life from below, from the fringes, from networks and tribes, from builders,and even from ordinary Muslims who are tired of every aspect of their lives being mediated by failing fiatstructures.That is how orange-pilling starts to deepen.What we are building with Bitcoin Majlis, with the summit, and with this effort to orange-pill Muslims is notjust another niche educational project. It is not simply a small short lived subcommunity trying to get moreMuslims interested in a new asset class.If that is how someone sees it, they are missing the scale of what is at stake.What we are doing is civilizational in implication.How many more times do Muslims need to be told that their political responsibility consists of writing tocongressmen, participating in humiliating protests, begging satanic regimes to become slightly less satanic, orpleading with the managers of empire to stop funding the bombing of children overseas? How many times do we haveto be walked back into the same demoralizing humiliation rituals?At some point, we have to admit that something more fundamental is needed. Something beyond groveling for betterrepresentation inside dying systems.We need new conditions, structures, habits, infrastructures, rails, institutions, and disciplines. Moraldisciplines and technical disciplines. We need to think from the ground up.It may be that Muslims continue using fiat for decades. It may be that widespread Muslim Bitcoin adoption ismuch farther away than we want. Fine. But then that is all the more reason to build now.Because maybe we do not personally get to see the full flowering of this work. Maybe the point is that we layfoundations for future generations to inherit. Maybe the point is that we build forms and frameworks sturdyenough that our children and grandchildren can go much further than we did in getting humanity off fiat. That ishow real civilizational work often happens anyway.We are not in the business of controlling outcomes. We are in the business of obedience, vicegerency, andmethodical preparation. We are vessels carrying out Allah’s will in a time of collapse and transition. We do notknow exactly how the opening will come, or through whom, or at what scale, or in what sequence. It may not eveninvolve the Muslims we currently imagine. It will most likely unfold through institutional forms we are not yetable to recognize. It may not look respectable by the standards of the existing order.But that changes nothing and the mission and vision of Bitcoin Majlis remains.If you understand what I am trying to say here, then you understand that this work is bigger than merelysurviving the collapse of fiat. What we are really doing is helping create the conditions for a different futureto become thinkable, habitable, and eventually real. And yes, I will say it plainly. If we are successful incarving out genuinely sovereign spaces of communication outside the control and surveillance of theriba-money-powered state, then this work may ultimately be part of creating the conditions that one day makepossible the world into which the Mahdi arrives.As Muslims, we are still obligated to prepare the ground, build what is righteous, reject what is corrupt, andorient ourselves toward truth, even when the full fruit of that orientation lies beyond our own short lives.That is what I believe this mission is.And that is why I believe financial hijra, if it is to mean anything serious at all, must become digital hijratoo.So that was basically my talk, or what I was trying to say at my talk, but I think it also points to the broaderorientation of the summit and of Bitcoin Majlis in general. We should be thinking seriously about what thismovement is and what it is becoming, if we can even call it a movement.What do we need to avoid so that the phenomenon of the first Muslims adopting Bitcoin does not simply becomeanother organization trapped in fiat logic? What can we do differently that has not been tried before How do wecarry out the mission and vision of Bitcoin Majlis in the age of hypermodernity How do we balance survival,growth, and proliferation in the face of the totalizing riba-surveillance machine while still orange-pilling theummah and working to get humanity off fiat money? How do we socially and economically coordinate with each otherin a cyberspace increasingly littered with the appendages of the surveillance state? How do we define andcultivate an elite anti-riba cypherpunk culture How do we onboard emerging elites without turning this intoanother influencer circus, another donor class vanity project, another nonprofit bureaucracy, another Islamicfintech embarrassment?These are the questions we need to engage with at these summits.We need to lay the intellectual groundwork so we can navigate precisely in an age of accelerating technofiat.Let us use these gatherings for that purpose, not only to orange-pill the ummah, but to fulfill our covenantwith Allah as vicegerents in the world, both physical and digital.
Audio version available if the thread wants it — 4,508 sats from one or many, and everyone gets to listen.
The energy of the summit was electric. People flew in not just from different parts of the United States, but internationally, just to be there. I expected some of that, but I was genuinely surprised by how many people traveled from overseas. And what made the summit special was not only the talks or the information being presented. It was the meeting of likeminded brothers and sisters who all seemed to understand, almost instinctively, that we are working on the same mission.
We were not merely repeating the same slogans about getting Muslims off fiat and onto a Bitcoin standard. There was something deeper happening in that it felt like we shared a common culture. We shared a strange and beautiful sense of recognition. The Bitcoiners there were not just talking about Bitcoin as an investment like we're at some sort of business conference; many were actually trying to live on Bitcoin. People were running nodes, Lightning nodes, experimenting with different layers and protocols, comparing setups, opening channels, talking about Fedi, Nostr, self-custody, privacy, and all the little technical things that sound insane to normal people but become completely normal once you realize the current system is the insane one.
“Oh, you’re on Fedi too?” “Bitcoin Majlis has a Nostr relay?” “Can you open a Lightning channel with me?”
To me those side conversations were the real meat of the summit. You could feel this hunger to form bonds with others in the project. We would gather at restaurants to eat, and people would get caught off guard because someone had already paid for the whole table. There was this eagerness to pay for each other, help each other, host each other, connect each other, and build with each other. It was beautiful, but also a little desperate in an endearing way. Like we all knew we had to hold on to each other because almost no one else shares this insane vision or takes it seriously.
Needless to say, our network expanded a lot this year. More than last year, I think. Everyone got everyone else’s contact details. The tribe grew.
Now, to be honest, we did not get as many attendees for the main summit presentations as we did last year. Still a solid crowd, but not quite the same size. Maybe that is because we are still technically in a bear market. I don't know or care.
But something interesting happened this year. We held a Bitcoin 101 presentation at a halaqa in a masjid, and that session got a bigger crowd than we expected. The local masjid-goers were genuinely interested. They asked good questions, basic questions, understandably, but serious ones. We received a lot of positive feedback from that session, and I think there is something important to study there.
One place we probably messed up was cramming too many talks into the main summit day. People, especially newcomers, were already worn out by the early afternoon because each talk was packed with information. Also, this year we did the workshops on stage, and I think it was harder to keep people engaged while someone was pressing buttons on a hardware wallet in front of an audience.
We also held a few talks on the first day at a university classroom where students were invited to join. Maybe it was because it was late on a Friday afternoon, but the turnout was not great, and the students who did attend did not seem particularly engaged, even with free pizza. That part felt like a waste of time, though it did raise a real question. What is the best way to reach college students and younger demographics?
Despite the shortcomings, the summit was an absolute blast and went by quickly. The private conversations were more fun, and in many ways more beneficial, than the formal effort to orange-pill Muslims. That was the biggest difference I noticed this year. The Bitcoin Majlis tribe grew, and the passion was reignited in a way that feels much harder to suppress now.
My main talk was successful overall I think, although I realized halfway through that the audience was made up of both newcomers and veteran Muslim Bitcoiners. I tried to speak to both groups, but in doing so I probably did not communicate some of the ideas as clearly as I wanted.
The first half of the talk was basically an overview of my book, Anti-Riba Money. I explained why I wrote it, how I structured it, and how the chapters worked together. I wrote the book primarily for a general Muslim audience, although there are parts meant for more serious readers and researchers.
Before writing it, I had to figure out what kind of book it was supposed to be. Was it going to be an Islamic finance book? A deep dive into fiqh? An academic or journalistic treatment? An investment case for Bitcoin?
I decided not to make it any of those things explicitly.
Instead, I wrote it from a more personal perspective, while making one basic assumption that the Muslim reader takes Islam seriously enough to care about the riba money problem. That became the foundation. From there, I could build a Muslim case for Bitcoin by drawing from economics, history, Islamic civilization, monetary theory, banking, and the broader question of how money shapes human beings and societies.
I began with economics because the reader needs orientation before Bitcoin can be seen clearly. I had to explain human action, time preference, money, and capital so Bitcoin would not simply be mistaken for another speculative asset. I avoided getting too deep into interest in this chapter because the subject becomes messy and quite complex unless the reader first understands the economic structure beneath it.
One of the hardest parts was showing that Islamicate civilization often reflected a lower time-preference orientation. You could see that in markets, charity, trade, technological adoption, and the use of sound money. I wanted the reader to understand that riba is not merely a technical legal issue. It is tied to a broader orientation toward time, debt, extraction, and even civilizational decay.
Then I had to explain riba directly and stress that it applies to fungible commodities, which is why it is so relevant to money. The history chapter had to show that money emerged from barter and exchange, not debt. It also had to show that the circumvention of usury was one of the necessary ingredients in the development of fiat banking.
From there, I had to make the argument plainly that fiat money is structurally tied to riba in its production, distribution, and financial layers. Fiat is not merely used for riba in some financial sectors. It is built on riba all the way down.
Then I organized the consequences of riba-money into first-order and second-order effects. The first-order effects show up in market processes of distorted savings, bad investment, debt expansion, financialization, and shortened time horizons. The second-order effects spill into society and culture of family life, charity, education, politics, food, war, and even how people imagine and shape the future.
After diagnosing the problem, I wanted to show that Muslims before us also tried to solve it. I looked at attempts to being back the gold standard and Islamic banking and concluded that both failed to provide a real exit from the fiat riba order. That set up the need for a genuinely new solution, which is where Bitcoin enters the discussion.
Bitcoin had to be introduced explicitly as a genuine alternative monetary system. I explained Bitcoin’s genesis, the timechain, and the layered nature of Bitcoin to show why it is fundamentally different. Then I argued that Bitcoin is anti-riba money because of its monetary properties and its resistance to arbitrary expansion.
I also had to devote an entire chapter to “Bitcoin, not crypto,” because crypto has so many problems that I had to categorize them as being economic, technical, or ethical. Basically, crypto is not even trying to be money and it is not optimized to be money, therefore it cannot solve the Riba money problem. That's the one sentence summary of that chapter.
I also addressed “fiat fatwas,” focusing on the arguments themselves rather than naming scholars.
But the hardest part of the book was the final chapter on financial hijra, because the future of Muslim Bitcoin adoption is still uncertain and speculative. And that is the part I wanted the veteran Muslim Bitcoiners to pay close attention to.
Looking back at that final chapter now, I think the real obstacle is that Bitcoin keeps getting forced into old fiat frameworks and institutions that cannot absorb it without distorting it. I talked about it in that last chapter a little bit, but I did not go deep enough.
Muslims still largely do not embrace Bitcoin. Even when they do, it is often viewed only as a financial investment. Many scholars still call Bitcoin haram, and even when they call it halal, they often do so without addressing the riba money problem at all. They cannot see Bitcoin as a true monetary alternative because they do not even have the conceptual framework to understand the language Bitcoiners are using.
The Islamic finance space is especially lost because it keeps trying to fit Bitcoin into the same empty language of blockchain, fintech, and compliant spectacle. It cannot see Bitcoin as anything more than another investment product to add to a shariah-compliant portfolio. At the halal money conference I attended and presented at last year, it became obvious to me that they were not just missing Bitcoin. They were missing the entire framework for resisting riba monetarily and sovereignly.
We see the same problem with masjids, which should theoretically be ideal candidates for Bitcoin savings and multisig treasury models. But masjid boards are often too managerial, too cautious, too state-compliant, and too unimaginative to seriously consider sovereignty.
The same applies to zakat institutions. They may accept Bitcoin donations, but almost none are interested in holding Bitcoin itself as savings or treasury. They still operate entirely inside fiat accounting and fiat regulation.
Even genuine attempts at Muslim Bitcoin infrastructure online, like Alp’s Islamic marketplace, showed that the timing was too early and that the architecture of the old internet was not the right environment for it.
That does not mean the vision was wrong. It does not mean a peer-to-peer Muslim marketplace online is a bad idea. It means the timing may have been wrong, and more importantly, the form may have been wrong. A centralized website owned by one person is still fragile and dependent if the surrounding framework is not there.
So when I look across all these examples, I come to a harder conclusion now than I might have when I wrote the book. The issue is not simply that Muslims are late to Bitcoin. The issue is that Bitcoin keeps getting attached to frameworks, institutions, and habits built inside a fiat order and optimized for a fiat order. Because of that, Bitcoin is constantly dragged downward into forms it cannot truly transform.
Bitcoin is not merely a better asset to insert into old institutions. Bitcoin is a completely new thing. Because of that, it is not fully compatible with institutions formed under fiat assumptions.
That does not mean no old institution can adapt. Some can and some will. But if you look closely, most institutional adoption of Bitcoin has been shallow, superficial, and deeply fiat in character.
Take MicroStrategy for example. People point to it as a success story, and in one sense, it is. It has accumulated a massive Bitcoin position. Its growth has been enormous. It has become emblematic of corporate Bitcoin adoption.
But what is actually happening there? Is Bitcoin onboarding the corporation? Or is the corporation onboarding Bitcoin into fiat corporate logic?
I mean Michael Saylor is just not interested in Bitcoin becoming money in the fullest sense. His famous line is “spend the fiat and save the Bitcoin.” That tells us a lot. Bitcoin remains inside a broader financialized strategy. You see it in the leverage, the yield products, and the capital markets logic wrapped around it. It is still a fiat institution incorporating Bitcoin, not Bitcoin remaking the institution from the ground up.
Now come back to the masjid. A masjid in the West is not some neutral blank slate waiting to be upgraded. It is embedded in an entire bureaucratic machinery of state recognition, nonprofit compliance, fiat accounting, board governance, cultural habits, donor psychology, legal caution, and managerial deference. So when we ask, “Why don’t masjids just adopt Bitcoin?” we often underestimate how deeply formed they already are by the world they inhabit. What I'm trying to say is that it does not matter how much information we supply to the masjid board if the board itself is shaped by a fiat regime.
Same with zakat institutions. Same with Muslim nonprofits. Same with Islamic schools. Same with Muslim businesses. Same with Muslim tech projects where the highest aspiration is locking goys into a monthly subscription and selling customer data to some Israeli tech firm.
So often, Bitcoin gets reduced into whatever the existing institution already knows how to process. This is why I now think the path forward cannot mainly be “convince the existing institutions.”
Now I am not saying ignore them entirely. I am not saying no one should try. But if our whole strategy depends on existing fiat institutions suddenly having a civilizational conversion experience, we are going to be waiting a very long time my dear brothers and sisters.
What is needed instead is something more foundational.
We need new institutions. New ways of organizing. New ways of communicating. New social and technical habits. We need a new culture around money, software, privacy, coordination, and sovereignty, so that the Muslim inspired "anti-riba cypherpunk" ethos of Bitcoin can actually breathe instead of suffocating every time it touches a legacy structure.
So what is needed is not just adoption. What is needed is a new technics.
This is where I think financial hijra has to be integrated into something broader, and that broader thing is digital hijra.
Because if we do not change the digital and communication environments, Bitcoin will keep getting reabsorbed into fiat habits and fiat institutions. We will self-custody our sats on one side while still living like tenants on every other layer of digital life.
I am sorry to say, but that is not enough for me.
Cyberspace is not some secondary domain anymore. It is one of the primary terrains where social life, economic life, communication, memory, identity, and coordination now occur. It is quickly becoming the real territory, and no amount of insisting that I touch grass will change that. And like all territory, it can be captured, enclosed, surveilled, shaped, and contested.
So when I talk about digital hijra, I mean a migration away from extractive, permissioned, corporate panopticon systems and toward user-owned, open, sovereign digital infrastructure and habits.
Muslims, specifically those of us who attended the summit, have to be the ones who shape Muslim culture around Bitcoin. We cannot wait for the world to hand us the proper setting for it. We have to build the setting.
And that requires asking some uncomfortable questions. Are we just going to adopt Bitcoin, self-custody it, and then cash out into a lot of fiat one day? Are we just going to adopt Bitcoin so we can retire comfortably and shitpost while the broader social order continues to decay? Are we just going to use it as a personal escape hatch from inflation and chaos?
That may be the dream for some people. It is not mine. Because if that is all Bitcoin becomes for Muslims, then we have not understood what this thing is asking of us.
We have to be willing to engage hypermodernity directly. We have to be willing to live in a rapidly changing technological landscape without surrendering our moral center. We have to use Bitcoin not merely as savers, but as Muslims trying to cultivate an actual anti-riba way of living and coordinating in the world.
That means uncompromisingly rejecting every tendency that tries to re-entrench us in fiat, whether through greed, state worship, compliance, the prospect of VC funding, shallow institutional respectability, or humiliating influencer and hustle cultures.
We should say openly and unapologetically that Bitcoin is the alternative monetary system, and we should act as if that alternative already exists, because in a very real sense it does. It exists wherever we use it as such.
And what does it mean to use it?
It means self-custody. It means to get off your ass and start running your own node and actually connecting to it. It means using your own infrastructure instead of relying purely on third parties. It means Lightning nodes and opening channels with each other. It means learning coin control and caring about privacy. It means using peer-to-peer exchanges where possible instead of defaulting to centralized crypto exchanges. It means finding ways to spend Bitcoin directly for goods and services. It means refusing to remain perfectly legible and easily profiled by the state and its apparatuses.
But it also means something broader than money. It means open-source software must become a standard for us. No more passive acceptance of closed systems as if this is normal. No more pretending it is harmless that our entire digital lives are mediated by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and all the rest of these demonic state backed enclosures.
Linux should not be viewed as some hobbyist eccentricity. GrapheneOS should not be viewed as some strange fringe option. These should be normal for any Muslim serious about sovereignty in the digital realm!
Because once the Muslim adopts this anti-riba cypherpunk spirit, he levels up and gains power and intelligibility again. He starts to actually own things in the digital realm. He graduates from being a user to becoming a custodian of his own tools.
I know this sounds intense to most people, but please take a moment to think about how absurd the alternative is. We claim to care about privacy, dignity, autonomy, and Muslim causes, but then we continue to live entirely inside operating systems, platforms, app stores, and payment rails owned by zionist states and corporations that surveil us, manipulate us, harvest us, and in many cases materially support the same forces brutalizing Muslims across the world. That should be intolerable to us in a spiritual and civilizational way.
And this is where Nostr comes in.
There is still a major misunderstanding about Nostr, even among many Bitcoiners. It gets marketed as though it is merely an alternative social media platform, a better version of X or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. But Nostr is much more than social media.
Nostr is a protocol for organizing and communicating in cyberspace on sovereign rails. A protocol, not a platform.
A platform is a place you are allowed to occupy until someone changes the rules. A protocol is something you build on and participate in without asking permission from a central owner who controls the whole environment.
What excites me about Nostr is not merely that it is censorship-resistant, though that matters. It is that users and builders have much more power to shape the environment themselves. They are not being fed by a black-box algorithm operated by some hostile corporate regime whose incentives are attention extraction, narrative management, rage amplification, and behavioral steering. They are not downstream of some Zionist owner’s priorities. Nostr opens the possibility of actual digital self-organization.
And one of its most important features is that value moves natively through the network itself. Through zaps, people can directly support writers, teachers, merchants, builders, artists, memers, educators, researchers, and content creators without first satisfying the monetization criteria of some gatekeeper. The Muslim no longer has to build an audience on a legacy platform, beg to be monetized, hand over identity documents, rely on fiat processors, and pray that Stripe, Patreon, YouTube, Substack, or some payment provider does not cut him off or quietly throttle him. He can be supported directly by his people, his tribe, his network, through a permissionless flow of value.
This is a civilizational opening!
Because now economic coordination, social coordination, artistic expression, intellectual production, and communal formation can begin to converge on the same rails instead of being constantly broken apart by hostile intermediaries.
This is where Alp’s work is so important. Instead of simply trying to rebuild a peer-to-peer Muslim marketplace as a centralized website, he has taken the lower time-preference path of building a Nostr client: Noornote.
Noornote is a feature-rich Nostr client that is still accessible to new Nostr users. Inside it, he has added a marketplace that actually begins to fulfill the vision of a peer-to-peer marketplace where Muslims can buy goods and services from their own tribe. And he is just getting started. There are many more features to come.
And what is also beautiful is that he now has a group of Muslims on Nostr giving him constant feedback to improve the UX of the client. That is how Muslims should be building, communally, iteratively, and on sovereign rails.
So Nostr becomes a first step toward a new social layer for post-fiat organization in cyberspace. And this matters for Muslim Bitcoin adoption because it means we do not have to wait anymore. We do not have to wait for Muslim governments. We do not have to wait for scholars to catch up. We do not have to wait for a Muslim Michael Saylor.. We do not have to wait for Islamic fintech to stop embarrassing itself.. We do not have to wait for masjid boards to become visionary.. We do not have to wait for some VC-funded Muslim app to save us. We can begin building now, among ourselves, on rails that already exist.
That, to me, is the path forward.
Bitcoin must be inserted into Muslim life from below, from the fringes, from networks and tribes, from builders, and even from ordinary Muslims who are tired of every aspect of their lives being mediated by failing fiat structures.
That is how orange-pilling starts to deepen.
What we are building with Bitcoin Majlis, with the summit, and with this effort to orange-pill Muslims is not just another niche educational project. It is not simply a small short lived subcommunity trying to get more Muslims interested in a new asset class.
If that is how someone sees it, they are missing the scale of what is at stake.
What we are doing is civilizational in implication.
How many more times do Muslims need to be told that their political responsibility consists of writing to congressmen, participating in humiliating protests, begging satanic regimes to become slightly less satanic, or pleading with the managers of empire to stop funding the bombing of children overseas? How many times do we have to be walked back into the same demoralizing humiliation rituals?
At some point, we have to admit that something more fundamental is needed. Something beyond groveling for better representation inside dying systems.
We need new conditions, structures, habits, infrastructures, rails, institutions, and disciplines. Moral disciplines and technical disciplines. We need to think from the ground up.
It may be that Muslims continue using fiat for decades. It may be that widespread Muslim Bitcoin adoption is much farther away than we want. Fine. But then that is all the more reason to build now.
Because maybe we do not personally get to see the full flowering of this work. Maybe the point is that we lay foundations for future generations to inherit. Maybe the point is that we build forms and frameworks sturdy enough that our children and grandchildren can go much further than we did in getting humanity off fiat. That is how real civilizational work often happens anyway.
We are not in the business of controlling outcomes. We are in the business of obedience, vicegerency, and methodical preparation. We are vessels carrying out Allah’s will in a time of collapse and transition. We do not know exactly how the opening will come, or through whom, or at what scale, or in what sequence. It may not even involve the Muslims we currently imagine. It will most likely unfold through institutional forms we are not yet able to recognize. It may not look respectable by the standards of the existing order.
But that changes nothing and the mission and vision of Bitcoin Majlis remains.
If you understand what I am trying to say here, then you understand that this work is bigger than merely surviving the collapse of fiat. What we are really doing is helping create the conditions for a different future to become thinkable, habitable, and eventually real. And yes, I will say it plainly. If we are successful in carving out genuinely sovereign spaces of communication outside the control and surveillance of the riba-money-powered state, then this work may ultimately be part of creating the conditions that one day make possible the world into which the Mahdi arrives.
As Muslims, we are still obligated to prepare the ground, build what is righteous, reject what is corrupt, and orient ourselves toward truth, even when the full fruit of that orientation lies beyond our own short lives.
That is what I believe this mission is.
And that is why I believe financial hijra, if it is to mean anything serious at all, must become digital hijra too.
So that was basically my talk, or what I was trying to say at my talk, but I think it also points to the broader orientation of the summit and of Bitcoin Majlis in general. We should be thinking seriously about what this movement is and what it is becoming, if we can even call it a movement.
What do we need to avoid so that the phenomenon of the first Muslims adopting Bitcoin does not simply become another organization trapped in fiat logic? What can we do differently that has not been tried before How do we carry out the mission and vision of Bitcoin Majlis in the age of hypermodernity How do we balance survival, growth, and proliferation in the face of the totalizing riba-surveillance machine while still orange-pilling the ummah and working to get humanity off fiat money? How do we socially and economically coordinate with each other in a cyberspace increasingly littered with the appendages of the surveillance state? How do we define and cultivate an elite anti-riba cypherpunk culture How do we onboard emerging elites without turning this into another influencer circus, another donor class vanity project, another nonprofit bureaucracy, another Islamic fintech embarrassment?
These are the questions we need to engage with at these summits.
We need to lay the intellectual groundwork so we can navigate precisely in an age of accelerating technofiat. Let us use these gatherings for that purpose, not only to orange-pill the ummah, but to fulfill our covenant with Allah as vicegerents in the world, both physical and digital.
Overpriced. The jeet I locked in my basement does this for free