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I get the theonomy argument. But Bitcoin isn’t civil government, it’s a tool, like mathematics. It exists under God’s sovereignty but serves everyone, like rain falling on just and unjust alike.
Civil magistrates punish evil. Bitcoin validates signatures. Those are different spheres of authority.
Whose interpretation of God’s law gets encoded anyway? Reformed? Catholic? The moment we make Bitcoin enforce morality, we’re fighting over which morality, and we’ve lost what makes it useful and unstoppable.
Your node, your conscience. Filter if convicted. But let’s not confuse individual faithfulness with protocol level enforcement. Even common grace operates without discrimination
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It's very true that Bitcoin has a very different sphere of authority than the civil magistrate. Yet there is still a very real sense in which Bitcoin is not just a signature validation machine, but an enforcer of a moral standard, just as surely as the civil magistrate ought to be. A peaceful enforcer, to be sure, but an enforcer nonetheless.
Take Bitcoin's supply cap. That is the instantiation of a moral principle into Bitcoin's code; namely that your money shouldn't steal from you, but should be a lasting abstraction of your productive time and energy that should grow in value over time, rather than shrink. Not everyone agrees with that statement, either. Plenty of folks out there think a monetary system that doesn't steal value from its holders is unworkable.
Even the purpose of signature verification you mentioned is based on a moral principle that no one should be able to take the value someone else has earned. Rather, each person should be able to dispose of his property voluntarily as he sees fit. Cryptographic signatures just ensure that moral principle is protected by inviolable code.
We could move on to mining and the difficulty adjustment. Both of these core aspects of Bitcoin exist to enshrine the moral principles that 1.) no one should be able to arbitrarily create value for themselves without work, and 2.) that no one should be able to reverse a transaction without the consent of all the parties of that transaction.
Most of these are just different outworkings of the basic principle "thou shalt not steal," of course, and applied to how a money ought to be designed to make various forms of theft difficult, if not impossible. Moreover, they are imposed unilaterally, in spite of the fact that there are plenty of people out there who disagree with many of the details of exactly how that basic principle ought to be reflected in our money.
