코인톡

"A time will surely come upon people in which none will remain but that he consumes Riba. If he does not consume it, he will be afflicted by its dust."
— Sunan Abī Dāwūd 3331

We are living in this time. Right now.

You can spend your whole life trying to keep your money clean, refusing the loans, the credit cards, the interest-bearing accounts, and still never escape it. The dust settles on you anyway. It is in the price of your food, the rent you pay, the wage you earn, the savings you hold. Whether you choose it or not, you are touching Riba every single day.

To see why, look at where our money actually comes from. Nearly every pound and dollar begins life as a loan. When a bank extends credit, new money is created out of nothing. But the bank only ever creates the principal, never the interest owed on top of it. That extra is simply expected to appear from somewhere.

Now think about the cycle that creates. If money is created as debt, and that debt carries interest, the system can never stand still. There is always more owed than there is money to repay it, so more has to be borrowed into existence just to service what already exists. The machine has to keep running. This is why the money supply only ever grows, in every country, decade after decade. It isn't a policy anyone could simply reverse. It is the nature of money that is born as debt.

And every time that supply grows, the money in your pocket is worth a little less. That is all inflation is: not prices mysteriously rising, but your money being quietly diluted to keep a debt-based system from seizing up. You are paying, slowly and invisibly, to hold a currency that has to be debased to survive.

It is tempting to dismiss all this as abstract economics, but it is a matter of faith. Once money is guaranteed to lose value over time, our ability to hold to our principles quietly erodes. Take Qard Hasan, the interest-free loan Islam so strongly encourages. Lend a brother £100, expecting nothing back but the £100. A year later he repays it in full, yet it now buys you less than the day you handed it over. Your generosity has cost you, in real terms. The only way to break even would be to charge a surplus on top. To charge Riba. You would refuse, of course; but that same penalty on generosity is what restricts the collective ability to lend Qard Hasan, and pushes people towards interest-bearing loans instead.

At the scale of a whole economy, with varying cultures and beliefs, you cannot rely on faith as a means of prevention. Every lender who simply wants to break even is pushed to charge interest, and they will. Not out of greed, but out of self-preservation. The system doesn't just permit Riba; it makes Riba the rational choice.

Put it together and the cycle comes into focus. Riba isn't sitting in one place, waiting for you to be disciplined enough to step around it. It is there at the source, in the way every pound is born owing interest that was never created. From there, inflation drives that same Riba downstream, amplifying it at every step, until it has seeped into every transaction and every price you pay. It is there at the top, and multiplied all the way to the bottom. That is why you can't escape it. Not for any failing of yours, but because it is built into the money itself.

None of this lets us off the hook, though. That the system is rigged against us explains the difficulty; it does not excuse us from finding a way out. For most of our lifetimes there genuinely was no feasible alternative, so "this is just how the world works" held some weight. That simply isn't true anymore.

I, along with many others, firmly believe the way out is Bitcoin. Not another Islamic finance product with an Arabic label stitched onto the same broken system, but a different foundation entirely. A money that was never born of debt, that no bank issues as a loan, that no authority can print, debase, or inflate away. Its supply is fixed, so holding it costs you nothing, and lending it freely no longer needs to come at a loss.

The fight against Riba is about more than willpower, and it is never going to be won through one careful personal decision at a time. It starts further back than that. It starts with the money itself. With opting out of a system built on Riba, and into one that isn't.

But this isn't a fight any of us wins alone. It needs Muslims willing to look the system squarely in the eye and work out, together, what comes next. That is the conversation the @muslimbtcsummit exists to have, and this October it comes to the UK for the first time. If what you've read here unsettles you, that instinct is worth following. Even if you have your doubts. Even if you're not convinced. Even if your instinct is to reject the solution we're proposing. Come and ask the hard questions. This is how we start to build the way out.

October 10-11 | London, UK

https://t.co/zPTXJpO2c8