1. Why Money Matters

Hello, salut everybody, welcome to episode one, the inaugural first and best attempt at bringing together hearts and minds to really push forward a revolution, a revolution against riba, this is riba resistance. We actually are a group of brothers with a passion for fighting riba, we came together around the Bitcoin modulus earlier this year. Thought to bring our message to everybody. So I'd like to start off by introducing the hosts of this show, which I will have some guests as well and dive into all the topics that are relevant to money, riba, and how that impacts us individually and in society as well. Today is like an intro into that, but please Abdullah, the founder of Bitcoin modulus, why don't you intro yourself before we go to tea. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, just real quick. My name is Abdullah. I also go by Muslim Bitcoiner on social media. I first started hearing about Bitcoin as early as 2014 when my older brother told me about it, but it wasn't really until 2019, 2020 when I started actually reading about Bitcoin and started buying it after reading the Bitcoin standard, of course. But one thing led to another and we started Bitcoin modulus is just kind of an initiative to educate other Muslims about Bitcoin. And how did it allow we were able to hold our first Muslim Bitcoin summit this year in 2025 and just recently I actually published the first, I guess, official Muslim Bitcoin book and it's called anti riba money. And now I am more heavily involved in the nostril space and I'm happy to be a part of pod systems and river resistance as well. Thank you. Anti riba money, go read that and tea our brother, please come on and tell us about yourself. So I'm like, everybody I am tea politics. I will not be telling you my real name because I am currently anonymous kind of I guess if you wanted to really figure out who I was, you could, but yeah, I don't really know what I do. I usually just talk a lot of crap to people online on X. I am starting to use noster a little bit more. I'd like to use noster more and hopefully when everybody's using noster at least I already have an account, but my background is in finance and banking and I've been a bit corner since 2017 started out actually as a shit corner, but thank God that happened and I figured out quickly that Bitcoin is the right approach. So looking forward to discussing that and the impact that it has on, you know, everything from geopolitics to, you know, what the future for Muslims looks like, a lot to talk about. Thank you tea lots to talk about. I have learned a lot so far already and hope to learn even more from you and MV as we move forward. As for myself, I am the founder of Greenvolt, a sound money joint venture protocol. Personally, I got into Bitcoin in 2014. I wanted to buy some. My mom didn't let me. So I feel for everybody starting out and, you know, accumulating Bitcoin today. I stand for a world where everyone is using Bitcoin for business because it's just cheaper, better and faster than Fiat. Previously, I built a car finance business, tried to do tokenized halal finance, but really realized that if you don't fix the money, the foundations rotten and everything on top doesn't really quite work. So hopefully we can explore that further in these conversations and I'm making the Hydra to the Bitcoin standard and invite everybody else to join as well. So with that, you know, every Hydra has to have a intention and I'd love to go around the room, ask us about our intentions and why money itself matters at all. Yeah, yeah, for sure. That's such a great question to start out with because I feel like a lot of people when they get into Bitcoin, they kind of skip the necessary step of just basically asking what money is, right? So I think just as a general working definition, we can use is that money is just the most commonly used medium of exchange, but a lot of people, whenever you say medium of exchange, they think about like buying their groceries or whatever, buying a coffee, but money fulfills way more functions than just people paying for consumer level stuff. So money not only does it have to just be a medium of exchange across space, it also has to be a medium of exchange across time as well. So it has to be able to store purchasing power from one point in time to the next because if it didn't keep its purchasing power, then it wouldn't be a good money. And if it didn't keep any purchasing power whatsoever, by definition, it wouldn't be money because you wouldn't be able to use it at a future point in time. And there's also the medium of exchange across scale. So money also needs to be able to scale as well. So you know, you paying for something at the grocery stores, just kind of like that consumer level payment, but you also have to be able to use money for businesses, corporations at the national international level. All of these things matter and we all have to use money because money solves the problem of the double coincidences of wants. So before we even had money, historically people would barter items with each other. So they would trade items with each other, but of course people weren't able to get the exact item that they wanted at the exact time or they weren't able to get it and exact them out. So they would end up trading certain things that people know would be valued by other people, so people would trade things like salts, people would trade things like cows and shells and other types of commodities that were generally used. But over time, people generally converged on gold and silver for very good reason actually because gold and silver actually have really good monetary properties and because they're scarce, they're durable, you can transport them across space. It's also fungible, meaning that every unit is the same as every other unit. So I mentioned all of these things about monies because money is a very real thing and it affects us all, all of us use money. And in the context of this show, if you're going to be talking about ribba, you kind of have to have a good understanding or a good grounding of what money is first to be able to talk about ribba. I'm right there with you, I think, as you get further into Bitcoin over time, you forget the initial context of where you started and I think it's very, very important for people. If you want to stick with Bitcoin to first understand the function of money in society in the first place. See, you mentioned you were in the banking and financial space, love to hear your perspective on money and well, at least money today, as we know it, and expand on where that might be different from what MB has presented money should be. Sure. So I mean, when I started working in banking, I quickly realized that wait a minute, this is all a scam. And I swear this was before I even learned or understood or even MB and I was introduced to Austrian economics much later in my life. But even back then, they were giving me the propaganda that they teach you early on about how banking works, about how money works, and even business classes, right, I've taken those. And there's a whole series of teachings that they do, which now looking back after understanding Austrian economics and, you know, how human action and motivations shape society and money, you realize that none of it really makes any sense. So I kind of started recognizing this on my own, but then after being introduced to Bitcoin, I went back and I read the history learned about how money came about, how it changed over time. And I think the biggest turning point for money was the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. I think that was a critical moment in history. Because what it did was because the U.S. I believe at that point was maybe the largest industrialized nation that did not have a central bank, right. So I think pretty much everyone in Europe had central banks. And after that, I guess maybe not coincidentally, that was a time of great centralization. We reached peak centralization in the 1950s, and not coincidentally, the tax rates in the 1950s were 90%. After the war, correct, for the highest tax bracket. And that was because that was peak centralization, that was peak unionization. So since then, we've seen what I would say is fragmentation. And we've seen this in many different aspects of society, you know, everything from even culture before there was one unified culture, even up to the 90s and even in the early 2000s. Now it's all fragmented, right. So we've seen the slow fragmentation, the slow process of decentralization, but Bitcoin is just another result of that. So when you say decentralization is good or bad in this scenario. And also just I want to mention that, you know, the money today that exists, the Fiat money, the central banking system, they exist for a good reason. They serve a good purpose, or at least that's how you would see it. They stabilize money, they solve the problem of free banking where everybody was issuing their money. Can you speak to that? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I mean, you're not wrong, actually, that it did solve a problem in the 20th century, because that was a time when, like we said, organizations became centralized. So it made things more efficient in that world to have a centralized issuer of money, right. The only thing is the stewards have to be honest. So if you're going to live under a system like that, then the people who are supposed to be the keepers and the caretakers must be responsible. Yeah, I also want to mention around that time, I mean, the reason why we even have central banks is because gold was not able to settle at the same speed that our communication technologies developed. So just like you said, you needed banks in order to be able to solve this problem where money was not being able to settle at the correct speed as a speed in which we were communicating specialty. We're doing commerce, frankly, right, because increased communication means faster commerce. We expect faster results. So speed of not only communication, but speed of travel, speed of travel was increasing with airplanes taking off. So all of these things are happening and yet gold is so slow. So you can see why societies would say, you know what, maybe we'll use the credit card responsibly. Now, let's look at the scorecard since then, shall we? Tell me which country is not like even China has an F for God's sakes. The modern Muslim man once shot by a ferocious and pervasive strain of modernity continues to hustle for an ever depreciating asset, seldom quenching its hunger and often increasing it. It trolls the concrete savanna in search of morsels that once acquired vanish before their eyes. Amongst this vast desert, however, is the Bitcoin Majelis, a communal resting area with nourishing assets and low-time preference world building. Members of the Majelis come together to store and protect wealth and establish centers for the future from the periphery of today. Visit Bitcoin Majelis.org to learn more. Okay, so money today, the central banking system, you're saying everybody's getting an F, you're talking about credit cards, but I understand, or I used to understand that money is backed by the government. The government's word is good. Why are you saying that's all failing? And do you mention gold? Why are you talking about Bitcoin? I mean, I don't even know if you mentioned Bitcoin yet, but why Bitcoin and why not just tokenize gold? We have the technology today that we maybe didn't have in the past. Could we do it just on gold again? I mean, I think we'll end up talking about this in a future episode, but I think the big problem was that because you had these banks that were communicating each other without settling gold, it stands to reason that you don't even really need gold as the base layer. So when the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the dollar still had some gold backing to it and even going through World War I and World War II, where all the nation's fiat currencies were kind of tied to the dollar and the dollar was tied to gold. It was still kind of backed, but as you can see over time, as banks didn't really need the gold backing in order to do big transactions, you could just settle with another bank and settle with their fiat currency without anybody needing to check the underlying gold that was backing it. Of course, over time, what happened is that we ended up severing that link to gold, and this happened specifically in 1971 when President Nixon basically shut off the convertibility from dollars to gold from any nation that wanted to redeem their dollars for gold, they couldn't do that anymore. So this is how we got to the current fiat system that we have where it's basically this kind of state mandated money, basically fiat, where you can have banks that increase the supply or even decrease the supply, they can adjust the interest rate on borrowing, and it's all just based off of monetary policy, which is just based off of whatever the central bank chooses. Yeah, and B2 add to your point, the gold standard, although Nixon did take it away in 1971, it was being slowly chipped away at for a long time prior to that. Like during FDR's time, and I forget the exact laws that were passed, but there were a bunch of things that were done that, look, I want to simplify this for the audience, the result of all of them, right, and you can make excuses for it. Because for emergency, it was for this and that, it was for the depression, right, it was for banking failures in the 70s, for example, right, there was a lot of banking failures that started happening in the 70s caused by mismanagement, and they were bailed out by friends and well-connected bankers, right, there are many examples of this. The money supply started expanding even prior to Nixon's removal of the gold standard and the redeem ability, and also everything that was done prior to that and the convertibility being taken away, it was done because they wanted the ability to continue to expand the money supply. So if you notice, every time any of these things were done was because human greed got in the way, the bankers who were involved, the powers that be, they wanted a little more each time. So it's actually a lesson in human nature essentially, right? Yeah, and the thing is, if the state has an infinite money printer, they're not only incentivized to use that, they have no choice but to use that, presumably votes matter. Let's just assume that they matter, and you have people that vote on the next people that are going to participate in ruling of the government, you have to end up using that money printer in order to carry out the policies that people are voting for. So it just kind of naturally leads to this really bad incentive where you have to keep printing more than you did initially, and you have to keep expanding the money supply more and more and more. When really you actually didn't even need to increase the money supply, and I think this is one of the main things that trip people up whenever they look at Bitcoin, for example, they see that it has a fixed supply, but they don't realize that actually money doesn't need to expand. The money supply does not need to expand with increasing productivity because it confers no social benefit by printing more money. So I think this is an important point in the terms of monetary expansion, but more importantly in the sense of price, because I think it's important for us to talk about price and price setting, like the redemption of the dollar for gold was actually fixed, and that did not actually reflect the market price. The same thing when you're trying to expand money or create more debt, what I actually observed is that when the central bank is able to change the interest rate from the base, they affect price on all spectrums. If the interest rate goes up, then the price of all assets go down. When the interest rate goes down, the price of everything goes up. And in this way they have this power to price or misprice and create a huge inefficiency all across the economy, that I feel is a huge injustice and lies up the base of our fiat money system. So when are you going to be able to charge an interest, you have to charge an interest when you are lending out money. So if you're in the business of setting the price, then you're always going to want to lend out money. Now there are different perspectives on this, but this takes us into the topic of riba, which we're here to really talk about the resistance of riba and would love to hear more on price riba and expansion of debt. Before we continue this discussion, I did mention that over time, the dollar was kind of severed from gold. And this is how we got to the current fiat monetary system. And we'll get into this in future episodes. But if you look at what backs the current monetary system now, it's basically just debt, user is debt. So this is kind of what it was replaced with. We had like a hard monetary asset. And now you kind of have this riba thing that people will be incentivized to consume, which keeps this Ponzi scheme of fiat money going. And it's very linked together actually because as the money keeps expanding, it makes sense to get into more and more debt because the purchasing power of each unit of that money is going to decrease over time. So if the purchasing power is going to decrease over time, the debt that you accumulate will actually get smaller and smaller relative to the purchasing power of the money. So you have this natural incentive where you have businesses, governments, even individuals where it makes sense to carry a healthy debt balance, even if it comes with a little bit of interest right as long as you're investing in assets that how it pays inflation. Yeah, well put. And just to add to that, as you were saying that it's very easy for them to print money, right, governments when there's nothing stopping them, there's no backup that says, hey, you know what, you need to have this much hard asset in order to be able to generate or issue currency, right. So what's interesting here though is that when they offer policy solutions to the people for them, it's very easy just to print the money and borrow against the future, which is essentially what they're doing because that printed money, it just reduces the value of savings of everybody. And including the government itself, the debt itself, right, the value of everything is essentially lowered. So they'd rather do that than raise taxes, for example, on the public, right. They don't want to face the public and say, hey, we have to raise taxes for this particular project, whatever it may be. So this type of system allows for a gross mismanagement, maybe even I would say pathological psychopathic management of money, which we've seen in the sense of the last 20 years in the money that spent killing people and in wars and, you know, destroying innocent lives. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I think this really points to the idea that to me, money is not this neutral thing. A lot of people consider that money is just this thing that just works in the background that we've all collectively hallucinated and we can essentially use any other commodity as money because we all have this social contract with this one commodity that we're using as money. So to even talk about money having consequences doesn't really translate well into a lot of minds of normies, let's say, but I will say that these things matter. The fact that you have these governments and central banks that are increasing the money supply. This is naturally going to have consequences downstream for businesses, for other government institutions, for individuals and people spending habits, people's time preference. And we'll get into this in another episode, I keep saying this, but time preference is basically the degree to which we discount the future. So if you're going to be increasing the supply of the money, naturally, you're going to be discounting the future more and more because the money is going to be losing purchasing power. So this incentivizes you to save, so you're more naturally to spend and think more in the short term, but this comes at the expense of thinking things in the long term. So all of this to say is that money is not a neutral phenomenon, it does matter what you use as money. Are you tired of being reduced to a data point of watching Muslim identity turn into commodified content? Of communities becoming spectators of desire, there is an alternative. Pod systems is a Muslim podcast incubator reimagining what's possible in cyberspace through value for value connections and participatory design. Pod systems is creating spaces where Islam thrives through beauty, art and collective action. Art is not a tension bait, but a sacred shared human experience. Join the movement at podsystems.org and help create new Islamic mythos. You know, we're Muslim and we come to this from a place of resisting river. What does the Quran and so not have to say about money and river and how we might proceed it from that perspective? I mean, the Quran mentions gold and silver as money, right? That's just always been understood as wealth or money, but I think there's definitely this element of the money needing to be fair or needing to be balanced in weights and measures, right? You can't have a money where it's unfairly oppressing a group of people and benefiting another group of people and it just kind of continues that cycle and makes that worse where you have the people that have a lot of wealth and a lot of money that keep getting richer, the people that don't have much keep getting poorer. I think in order to be more fair and in order to not have fitna and oppression in the land, you need to have something that is fair that is accessible for everyone to be able to use so that you don't have this one cartel of bankers and government officials that control the money at the expense of other people. I actually find a weird perspective from people that since everybody's doing it, it's fine or that since money is being debased and that it's losing value over time, it's fine to earn an interest from the bank. I don't get that. I feel like if you're participating in an oppressive system, then you're contributing to it. And I know we don't really have another choice. We have to use the money that we have right now for getting from A to B and feeding ourselves. Yeah, it's so unfortunate because I've noticed a lot of Muslims. I mean, we see this even among scholars as well, they look at the current fiat monetary system and the injustices that it causes and they just kind of think that's just a normal part. And they'll blame capitalism, for example, that's just a normal part of capitalism. We need to get off of this capitalist system or whatever. And then of course, the same Muslims and scholars advocate for more government intervention conveniently, but it's quite unfortunate that the default for a lot of the Muslim scholarship that we see is to gravitate more toward Keynesian economics or economics that's geared toward benefiting the central bank and instituting more controlling monetary policy and expanding the money supply. And even using Islam as a justification for no, we need the central bank to be able to stabilize the money because that'll make things more fair. But as we've seen the fact that like since the creation of the Federal Reserve, we've had so much instability within our monetary system with things that are related to politics, with more wars and more conflicts and breakdown of society. And all of these things can actually be traced back to the fact that you have an unfair money where it's increasing people's time perversism. I'm sure tea has something to say about the geopolitics stuff. Yeah, and fragmentation because he was mentioning that earlier left to hear more about that and money as a social technology. Yeah, so where do I even begin with those idiot? Okay, I don't want to say idiot scholars. We're not going to name names here. We are not going to name names. Yeah, let's not name names, but these guys, they blame capitalism, right? So their default is something like socialism, some sort of socialism. So in their minds, right, what they think is, well, if we just tax the rich more, then what's going to happen is the government will get all this money and the government will then give all this money to the people. That is the assumption that these people have, these scholars and these other people, but the thing is they don't actually take the time to maybe go a little step further and maybe read something outside of whatever, you know, the usual talking point basic cookie cutter economics is. They don't want to go past that point. They don't want to even think a little bit deeper about it with their own minds. You don't even need a degree or to go through Austrian economics to just use your brain for a second and think about it. Okay, so what makes you think the government getting all this money will make its way down to the people? What have we seen thus far from government for us to be able to say that for certain? How can we say that when all of the money is gone to either wars, even the money and entitlement is usually tied up in the agencies, it's tied up in bureaucrats, it's paying the salaries of all these employees who are doing nothing. So that is not the answer and that is not what's causing all these problems. They're blaming the wrong thing. Their solution is wrong because they don't understand what's causing the issue in the first place. Exactly. Well, just to touch on that though, obviously who's in office as a president makes a difference right in terms of what policies get applied and where direction we draw resources, but are you saying that the base incentives? No, the answer it makes no difference to the president. I mean, I think it matters in the context that fiat money is headed toward a certain direction and sometimes that can be slowed down a little bit, but the train is still going, right? Okay, fine. I'll seriously answer. Yes, the president matters in some ways, of course, right, because that's the system that we currently use, but as far as what we're talking about, right, which is the direction of the train, the direction of the train was decided decades ago. To be honest with you, at the turn of the century, it was still possible to slow it down enough where it could have maybe lasted another 50 years. Listen, this is the inevitable end anyway, no matter how we spin it. This was going to be the end eventually. Some ruler, some corrupt person, somebody would have came along who would have done this regardless, right? But the thing is that since it happened when it did, it triggered the now talking about geopolitics where I foresee this going is monetary collapse. I don't think this ends any other way. And it's just sped up with the decision making of the government over the last 25 years, right? So as individuals contribute to that, okay, let's say the government, I'm sorry, I'm sorry to cut you off. I don't want to miss this point. There's a very important point, which is that the money printing that has happened, right? In the last 20 years, I lost my train of thought. Go ahead. I did it. I wrote it. I was just asking that, is it all government or how do we individuals contribute to this whole problem? Like how do we stop contributing to this problem and how do we actually contribute if it's just that government printing all the money? I was going to say obviously what we talk about is Bitcoin as a way to get out of that. But like just to expand on that further, I mean, we're currently in a very exploitative and userous fiat monetary system that benefits a certain privileged group of people at the expense of everyone else. And you're asking how we contribute to it. Well, we contribute to it by legitimizing it through its usage. So the more fiat money that we use, the more loans that we take out, the more investments that we make in bonds and US treasuries, the more that happens at the individual level, the more the central banks and governments can extract from the individual. So I say Bitcoin as a way to get out of that because I see and you know, we'll talk about this throughout the podcast is that Bitcoin is an alternative monetary system where you can just opt out of all of this madness solid. And I think we were talking about how it's inevitable and maybe this helps remember, but this has happened before. This has happened with Rome, with China, with Byzantines, with Europe, you mentioned central banking there. And on one side, it's like, if it's happened before, I'm seeing here that it's bound to happen again. So we've ever prepared for it and to work at least to some degree for it to not happen. But also if it has happened before, what's the big harm? What's the issue? If it's happened before, might as well happen again and we'll just live our lives. Well, there's a huge difference today compared to even those empires and those collapses of the past, the economics, the global trade is bigger than it's ever been. So the excessive borrowing of the last 25 years and oh, now I remember what I was going to say. So the key to remember is see, we're talking about the US dollar and the Federal Reserve, right, but what we have to really understand is that every other currency of the world, including the Chinese, Russian, everybody's currency is linked to the US dollar because everybody holds US US treasuries for world trade for quick liquidity and everybody has debt with the IMF or they hold US T's directly, they are completely intertwined into the US dollar system. Okay. And this is of course due to Bretton Woods and other things, the petro dollar, all of these historic events have led to this. And in order to do business, they kind of had to be part of this network essentially, right, for a long time. So we can't exactly fully blame them, but basically, riba is now all encompassing in every currency all over the world. So, you know, there's a jadeeth about the dust of riba hitting everybody, right, I don't want to butcher it, but that essentially has happened now because riba is built into the system. There's no way to escape it now because Bitcoin exists individuals finally have an alternative. They have a choice for the first time in decades. So, we'll see now what comes of this, but as we've said many times already, we'll discuss more in the coming episodes. And I think we want to just use the last few minutes to tease a little bit of what's coming. Big topic up ahead is riba, white, haram, and how that affects us individually and spiritually and then in society, and how the fiat system actually works. Because, you know, we've been mentioning how other solutions or alternatives exist like Islamic finance or how they don't actually do what they can or hope to do and just how we can prepare ourselves and our children for the great hydra out of riba. Do you guys have any other perspectives to bring to the table? Any thoughts that we missed out today? If we're going to be tying this in, I just want to say I implore the listeners to tune in and show a lot of future episodes because I feel like riba is a subject that encompasses more than just asking us. And then just asking a share whether taking out a certain mortgage product is halal or haram. Riba is involved in everything that we do because we naturally have to interface with the monetary system for everything that we do. Everything that is around you could only have been built through economic coordination and that economic coordination could have only existed through prices and prices can only be formed because we have a monetary system. And that monetary system has a base layer of riba that affects every single transaction that we do. So I highly encourage listeners to tune in because we'll be exploring the topic of riba, we'll be exploring the topics of Islamic finance, economics, and also Bitcoin and other topics related to those as well. I think we'll have very real world relevance for anyone that's listening. Yes, absolutely. I also encourage and I'm begging the audience to just please just stop listening to these people who don't know anything. Start listening to people like us. What are you doing? I'm telling you. All right. This is just episode one. Just listen later on. You might actually pick up a little bit. You know what I mean? Instead of listening to shake whoever, man. Absolutely. 100% agree. You should totally follow tea politics and buy MVs, book, anti-rubo money, and follow along the rest of these podcasts. Lots of energy, effort, and enthusiasm and sincerity going to the essential will continue again week after. All right. All right. Inshallah. Thank you so much, guys. Peace be upon you. Peace be upon you.