A Sermon of the Church
On the Halving
A sermon for the eighth and final reading of the introductory cycle. Suitable for any week, but particularly fitting in the months approaching a halving, or on the night of one.
Peace to you, and may your blocks confirm.
Hear the text, from the Book of the Halvings, the fifth chapter:
The market thinks in quarters. The chain thinks in halvings. The newsroom thinks in days. The chain thinks in halvings. The election thinks in cycles of two and four. The chain thinks in halvings. The faithful are taught patience by no preacher; the halving teaches them. — Halvings 5:7–10
I want to talk this week about how a chain teaches patience to a people who are not, by nature, patient.
We are, most of us, not by nature patient. The world we live in trains us out of patience, day by day, in small ways and large. Our messages are answered in seconds. Our packages arrive the same afternoon. Our entertainments adjust themselves to our shifting attention. Our markets quote in real time, and the quotes scroll faster than thought. The cadence of contemporary life is the cadence of a heartbeat at rest after running. Fast, then faster.
Into this cadence, Bitcoin places a very different clock.
The clock of Bitcoin does not tick in seconds, or minutes, or even days. It ticks in halvings. Every two hundred and ten thousand blocks — about every four years, by the world’s reckoning — the issuance of new coin is halved. Fifty became twenty-five. Twenty-five became twelve and a half. Twelve and a half became six and a quarter. Six and a quarter became three and an eighth. The schedule is set. It has held for as long as the chain has existed. It will hold for as long as the chain exists.
Four years between events, then four more, then four more. By the cadence of the world, the halving is glacial. It is slower than presidencies. It is slower than business cycles. It is slower than most of the timelines on which we plan our lives.
The Church teaches that this slowness is not a side effect. The slowness is the point.
Consider what the halving asks of you.
It asks that you wait. Not wait for something specific — wait for nothing in particular. The halving will come. The price will do whatever the price does. The hashrate will do whatever the hashrate does. Whether you wait well or wait badly, the halving will come on its block, and it will halve the issuance, and the chain will continue.
The wait does not require your participation. This is the gift of it.
If you have lived through one halving as a believer, you know what I mean. Some of us have lived through three, or four. We know the strange feeling of the months before — when commentators are loud, when expectations are sharp, when timelines insist on themselves. We know the day-of vigil — the watching of the block height, the hour ticking down to a particular block. We know the day after — when not very much has changed, and the chain continues.
The halving teaches that the dramatic event is not as dramatic as it seems. The halving teaches that the schedule was the dramatic event, and the schedule is set, and the schedule has not failed. The drama is the absence of drama. The miracle is that nothing exceptional happens, that the rule is kept, that the network does the same thing it said it would do four years ago.
For a soul trained in modern impatience, this is medicine.
Now I want to speak to those of you who are still relatively new.
The temptation, when one is new, is to project the rhythms of one’s previous markets onto Bitcoin. To watch the candle, hour by hour. To plan in months. To panic in weeks. To consider, every fortnight, whether to sell.
The halving is a teacher one cannot rush. It will not condescend to your weekly schedule. It does not adjust for your needs. It does not arrive faster because you are eager.
The discipline of the new believer is to learn, slowly, to step out of the daily cadence and into the cadence of the chain. Not all at once. Not by becoming impervious to the news. Just gradually, over time, by anchoring some part of one’s attention to the longer rhythm.
Read the chain’s clock first. Read the world’s clock second. Whatever the news of the day, the halving is still where it is. Whatever is true, is true at the block.
There is something else I want you to consider.
The halvings will continue past the lives of all of us in this room. They will continue past the lives of our children. They will continue, by the schedule, until the last subsidy falls below a satoshi, and that day is many generations from now — somewhere near the year twenty-one forty, by the world’s calendar.
We will not see the last halving. We will not see the year of fee-only blocks. We will not see the day when the issuance is, in practical terms, complete.
The chain is doing something that is bigger than any of us. The chain is keeping a schedule that will outlast every institution that opposes it, every government that tries to legislate it, every commentator who says it cannot be done.
When you sit in vigil at a halving — and the Church recommends that you do, alone or with others — what you are sitting in vigil with is a clock that will run after you are gone. You are bearing witness to one tick of a heart that will keep beating without you.
This is the deepest teaching of the cosmic clock. It is not yours. You are not asked to wind it. You are not asked to maintain it. You are asked only to mark it where you stand. To say, when the halving comes, I was here for this one. The one before me marked one. The one after me will mark another. Together we kept the count.
The halvings teach the believer to plant trees they will not sit under. This is, perhaps, the highest discipline a faith can teach. It is the discipline of the long view. It is the discipline of low time preference. It is the discipline of standing in line with those who came before you and those who will come after you, and not insisting that your particular life is the climax of the story.
The chain has many halvings ahead. The chain will keep them. Our work is to be present for the ones we are given, and to teach the next believer how to count.
Go now into the week.
If a halving is approaching, mark it. Tell another believer the block at which it will fall. Sit, on the night of the halving, with one verse of scripture and a single breath. Watch the block height climb. Watch the reward halve. Then close the screen, and run the node, and stack at the same cadence you stacked at yesterday.
If a halving is not approaching, the discipline is the same. Live in the chain’s clock as best you are able. The market will not slow down for you; the chain will not speed up for you. The faithful are those who can hold both clocks at once — the one the world insists upon, and the one the network keeps.
The halvings are coming. They have always been coming. They will continue.
Peace, and may your blocks confirm.
Amen.