Faithful Finance - Part 9

July 1, 2025

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

Faithful Finance - Part 9

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Alive, Applying God's word to your daily life.

As we finish the book of Deuteronomy, we're going to step aside for a few weeks and publish a workshop I did in August of 2024 called Faithful Finance. In that workshop, I explained our current economy, our current financial situation,

and did it from an economic background and a historical background, and most importantly, did it from a biblical perspective. In that workshop, you're going to find out why we are where we are as an, as a nation, as far as our economy and what we should be looking at and why we should be looking at it for the future,

not only for the future of the finances of individuals, but the future of the finances for our churches and for our country. And so I would encourage you to just spend some time listening.

Even though it is being published here a year later,

it is still true and it is still current for today,

meaning a perfect ledger.

If you go to the bank and want to send money to India, for instance,

you've got to send it, take it from your bank, and you got to send it to India to their bank,

and there might be problems with that and the government might come in and take it and they're going to charge you all kinds of fees, and all of a sudden the $12,000 you sent might be only worth 7 or $8,000 when it gets there.

Once you get through all the fees, and it takes you 21, 35, 48, two months for all those to work through all the regulations for that to happen.

It's a problem on the blockchain. It happens in many ways, almost instantaneously,

or for us, in the way we see things.

Because if you put a check in the bank and it's more than you have in your account, they're going to hold it for 10 days,

right then,

yeah,

they're going to hold it even though they know because they got this new stuff called the Internet,

right?

They know whether you got money in your bank by that evening, for sure, but they still hold it for 10 days, you reckon? Why?

All right,

if you kite checks, of course you can't now, but if you kite checks, you go to jail. They kite checks, they make millions,

and that's really what they're doing when they're holding your check when they already know. Now, you know, 20 years ago they didn't know, but when they already know that you,

that that money's good,

they can have it transferred that night.

When they hold it for 10 days, that's a problem.

All right,

so now we've got these blockchains that were built on,

okay?

And these blockchains are make it available that one day, one day you will still have your phone because you need something to take pictures with, selfies with for sure, right?

You're going to be able to have your phone and you're going to have that phone,

but you're also going to be able to connect to the Internet and connect to these blockchains that have applications built on them.

And the cool thing about them is there are so many computers that are keeping up that blockchain and those technologies. It's going to be very difficult for viruses.

You're not going to have viruses on your phones, you're not going to have viruses on your computers.

Any attack is going to be an attack to the blockchain, which is going to be met with hundreds and thousands and millions of computers that are maintaining it. And as technology gets greater, they're going to be better and better at maintaining that information.

All right,

that's the best way for me to describe that to you. Okay?

Now that is being described by somebody who is just a neophyte as far as computers. Although, you know, I've got two daughters that are software engineers and a son in law that are software engineer.

But that's really the best way for me to describe it in my pastor lawyer language.

That's how blockchain technology works.

Now I need to give you some information about how blockchain technology works because there are different blockchains,

okay?

Which would be obvious, you can see that in the way computers came about, right?

We had different types of servers, you had Apple,

you know, you had all the different types of servers. All right, well, we've got different blockchains.

The two most prominent blockchains are Bitcoin and Ethereum.

But you got xrp, you got Casper. I mean,

there are new blockchains. They're blockchain blockchains that have been around for 10, 12, 15 years.

They're building these blockchains.

Why are these companies building these blockchains? Because they're hoping that they will one day be the next Apple and that their blockchain will be successful and people will want to come and build layer twos on them on their blockchain.

Layer one is the original blockchain. Layer two are these programs that make it possible for people to build programs and work with the blockchain interface between.

I'm explaining to you in very rudimentary fashion, it's basically the interfacing between the blockchain and an app or a computer program.

So you've got layer twos that come be that are being built on these blockchains. And then the layer threes are literally the apps.

Facebook,

you know, something on the blockchain so that they can actually have an app on that blockchain. So when you're talking with your device to the blockchain, that it's using those apps and it's pulling it in and you can use it on your little device called a phone.

Make sense?

All right.

Yes.

Yes. Yeah.

When they say web3,

the whole thing I just explained to you is Web going from computers talking to each other to computers talking to computer forms to computers talking to a blockchain.

Okay?

That's Web three. Web one.

My computer's hooked up your computer and her computer, and our computer's talking to each other.

Web2 is. There's a server out there, and all our computers, all this group of folks. Computers are talking to the server, and server's talking back,

sending messages. Web3 is.

There's a blockchain up there, and it's talking and it's. And it's not only on one server. It's on millions of servers,

and the servers are keeping up with all the transactions.

Does that make sense?

I got to explain it to you or I'm not doing a good job with you? All right, Now I've got to explain. I got to step back and I got to explain something to you that is.

That is different.

There is a difference between a commodity and a security.

Okay? A commodity is something of value that I can exchange for something else of value.

A security is an agreement between you and someone else to do something on certain terms.

Does that make sense?

All right. The best way for me to describe it as a lawyer is if you come to my office and start talking to me about your estate.

I'm going to explain it to you, and I'm going to say, well, there's certain things that are in your estate, and there's certain things that pass outside of your estate.

If you've got a retirement account, it's got beneficiaries. Those beneficiaries are the product of a contract,

and when you die,

they have to pay those beneficiaries, and that money doesn't come into your state.

Or if you've got life insurance, the life insurance pays out to certain people.

And though that is a contract, that's outside the state, or if you have a bank account that has beneficiaries on it.

That money passes outside your state. It's a security.

Now,

what's left in your state are the commodities.

Your land,

your cars,

your.

Your grandmother's ring.

It's an item that is a commodity.

Now,

anything that is controlled by a corporation and can be changed contractually is a security.

The most important securities that we deal with now are bonds issued by companies and governments.

You give them the bond, you give them the money. They give you a bond saying they're going to pay you back this money at this time with this much interest,

okay? Or stocks,

which say on the thing that you can redeem this stock for this much money or for this much value or the market value of the company.

There's a million stocks, and you got one stock.

You can redeem this for one millionth of the company,

or you can sell it to someone else.

Those are security instruments.

They're governed by the Security and Exchange Commission.

Okay? Now, I want you to hear me in the crypto world.

Everybody in crypto wants all the crypto to be commodities,

but they're not.

And I need to tell you that they're not.

Because if a token or a stock or a bond is controlled by two parties based on of a contract,

then it is a security.

And you need to understand that this is a dangerous area because most cryptocurrencies are owned or run by corporations that the SEC refuses to regulate with actual law.

They are regulating by lawsuit,

which means they're saying you're not following the law, but we're not going to tell you what the rules are, and we're going to sue you over it.

Now, that's how that's happening.

Now, the problem with that is, is that with stocks,

if you buy a stock, that corporation has to give to the SEC and to the exchange that they're on, they have to give a.

They have to give reports of their finances.

And if they do it wrong,

people go to jail.

That's what the SEC exists for.

All right?

Cryptocurrencies are not being regulated the same way.

And I've said this to Brett. Brett loves crypto. I've said it to him, and I try to hammer it home to him every time. And I'm going to tell you I'm invested in other cryptos other than Bitcoin,

But I'm not telling you to buy those,

because you are buying a company that's not regulated like a stock is.

And if you don't have good reason to trust the people who are in the company,

they can do Stuff that a normal corporation can't do.

And they can change how that cryptocurrency operates. And I'm telling you, I own some of them.

And many of the blockchains that exist today are, are being changed all the time.

In fact, ethereum's gone through 21 major changes in how it operates because it's controlled by a group of people in a corporation.

That's not a negative thing,

it's just what it is. I'm not saying it as a negative thing. If you form a corporation with a group of people and you produce a product,

that's your corporation.

If I invest in that corporation, I have to have some level of trust that the people I'm investing in are, are who they say they are and they're going to work toward the goals they say they're going to work toward.

But as it with every corporation,

things can go wrong. We do live in a economy that tends toward chaos. There can be a problem with that.

Makes sense.

And we're in the age where everybody's trying to build all these computers and become the IBM or the Apple and there's going to become four or five or six of them that have a blockchain that works well and, and, and is efficient and meets the needs of the economy of the world.

That's going to happen.

Which one are they, Pastor? I don't know.

I don't know.

But if they do not follow certain rules,

then I can't even tell you whether they're doing it,

whether they're going to do it right or not, or whether it's going to work right or not.

I do know this,

that Satoshi,

which is either a man or a woman or a group of people,

created bitcoin as a blockchain and then just left it up to the servers to keep up with it.

No way to change it. Just created it and put it into the world.

Every other blockchain is still controlled by a company.

I can tell you four or five of them are going to be the big companies over the next hundred years.

I don't know which ones because bitcoin, once it was, once it became,

and I'm going to use the word decentralized,

meaning that no one person or no one computer controlled it. Once it became decentralized,

it moved from being a security to a commodity.

As you go today, I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you,

that he'll make his face to shine upon you, and that he will give you hope and peace today. In Jesus name.