Throughout human history, people have dedicated their lives to great works.

Travel to any location around the world, and what will you see?

Monuments to power. Mausoleums of humanity’s dreams. Odes to dynastic legacy and its hedonistic excesses. Paeans to the golden age of dead and dying empires. And most prominent and excessive, hymns to the holiest of holies - the divine.

Enter the Cathedral

Architecture is the one of precious few tools we have to understand our history.

Every culture, every society, every history had its epic structures. These represented the hopes, desires, and dreams of not only the moneyed classes who paid for their construction, but also of the architects who built them, and the unwashed masses who gazed upon them with awe and wonder.

These epic structures were the embodiment of man’s ambition to defy the constraints of what was possible and to achieve something as close to perfection as humanly possible. By manipulating the crude elements of the natural world into ethereal and fantastic shapes and colors, the masons who designed and built these structures were the hedons and heretics of their time.

For the purposes of this exploration, I want to focus on the cathedral.

The first structure that stood taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza was erected nearly four thousand years later.

It was a cathedral.

To understand the cathedral, we must understand worship. What was being worshipped with these monuments of great wealth and incredible new technology was not God.

As cathedrals took decades, and often even centuries to complete, few people who worked on them expected to see them finished during their lifetimes. Being involved in the construction of a cathedral, even as the patron, required a willingness to be part of a process that was larger than oneself. Some of the most inspiring architectural works in human history have been the result of religion, driven by the need to construct spaces where humanity could feel closer to a higher power.

Cathedrals were also the most ambitious way in which to develop and implement new technology, and attracted madmen and heretics - the masons who built these insane structures. The aspiration of the mason was to inspire awe. Height was one of the most desirable ways of doing so – to build a cathedral that would soar into the sky, visible from a long way off, was the mason’s dream. In order to do this, masons played the roles of inventor, architect, builder, craftsman, designer, and engineer. Their daring designs defied gravity and conventional building techniques, and resulted in the invention of many engineer marvels that have defined and shaped the modern world. Any technological advance that would enable the construction of a grander building was an important breakthrough, and could be financed in the name of God.

In spite of all of the darkness surrounding organized religion and its trimmings, at their core, cathedrals have achieved something very few things can. Intergenerational product market fit.

Our ongoing architectural fascination with cathedrals, mosques, and temples points to the continuing relevance of religious architecture. Although we may not all follow the traditions and beliefs of organized religion, the effects that these buildings create suggests a new type of architecture that can be relevant and even essential in our current world.

Capitalism Makes Shitty Cathedrals

Like every golden age, eventually the era of church and state reached its peak during the gilded age, and has been in a sad state of decline ever since. The state realized that money was better than God, so out went Jesus and in came corporations. Every age and empire needs its cathedral, and we filled the gaping hole left by god with another, more savage god, capitalism.

It only takes one glance at the skyline of our cities to see the cathedrals of capitalism.

The era of capitalism resulted in the creation of many demi-gods, self-styled deities who roam the streets of Manhattan and London and Singapore seeking to become immortal. While the church becomes more irrelevant every year that passes and no new monumental cathedrals have been constructed in centuries, the age of capitalism has brought us a new cathedral.

It is exemplified as a shiny metallic phallus, extending skyward, defiant and daring and obnoxious. It is home to the drones of worker bees that grease the wheels of capitalism, who worship at the altar of the corporation, pledging fealty to their “family” and repeating corporate platitudes like mantras from heaven. These new cathedrals carry all of the solemnity of religious space. These secular halls of worship with sparse marble lobbies emanate timelessness, awe, silence and devotion - what Louis Kahn called the “immeasurable” and Le Corbusier called the “ineffable.”

A Cathedral for the Digital Age

In our digital age, as we increasingly favor the vast expanse of cyberspace over our decrepid and aging physical world, what cathedrals will we build? What will awe, inspire, and endure the ravages of time?

Bitcoin is a cathedral for the digital age. In time, it will tower to the sky, and establish itself as a powerful and deeply moving monument of man's struggle for enduring permanence and connection to the divine.

While some think of Bitcoin as an asset class, I believe it is so much more. Bitcoin’s design is perfection in so many different ways - technically, socially, politically, economically. While some reject Bitcoin’s more esoteric elements to focus on the hard investment case, I believe we should embrace it. Nothing is more powerful than a shared belief system - some may call it religion - but all movements in our world are based on belief, complete with its own language and terminology, its own symbolism, and its own cathedrals.

The fact that we keep using rational terms (economics) to explain the irrational (the spiritual) reflects the growing secularization of our society. We do not see the divine in our every day existence nor do we consider places and objects to be sacred. Hence many thought leaders and titans of capitalism find it difficult to comprehend why anyone would build a cathedral like Bitcoin without a clear profit motive. They also don’t understand why millions of us gather in cyberspace every day, year after year, to continue building on Bitcoin for any reason besides money. The notion that communities constructed cathedrals voluntarily working from one generation to the next seems incomprehensible. But Bitcoin is precisely this.

As we rethink sacred space in our modern age, let us not forget that we must also build structures that endure the test of time in cyberspace. Many movements will come and go. Companies and projects will rise and fall. But Bitcoin will endure, block by block.