“O you who have believed, decreed upon you is fasting as it was decreed upon those before you that you may become righteous.” — Quran 1:183
Fasting is one of the special rituals of Islam. It encourages and teaches patience and delaying gratification, both of which are essentials to the Bitcoin philosophy. So, what does Bitcoin have to do with Ramadan?
Arabic Etymology Of Fasting And Ramadan
Ṣawm (Arabic for fasting) means abstention, this includes potentially abstention from food, drink, sexual intercourse and/or speaking. Fasting, in the Islamic sense, is the abstention from food, drink and sexual intercourse during the day. Ramadan is the month in which Muslims are obligated to fast.
The etymology and meaning of Ramaḍan is a disputable matter in the sources. Some say it means “hot weather” and it’s named so because when they chose the name it was hot. Others say it’s “the rain in the end of summer and the beginning of the fall,” or “the rain that finds the land burning when fallen” from the word, “Ramaḍi.” Solving this dispute, however, is beyond this article’s topic.
If you ask Muslims about the moral of Ṣawm, many will say, “It’s about sympathy for the poor and the disadvantaged.” However, many Muslim philosophers and philologists hold that it’s about patience, delaying gratification and self-fulfillment. We read in the old Arabic dictionary Lisan Al-Arab, “Fasting is patience.” This brings us to the next idea: HODLing is Ṣawm.
HODLing As Fasting
The philosophy of HODLing, held mainly by Bitcoin maximalists, has an underlying principle rooted in Austrian economics, namely, time preference. In economics, time preference is the current relative valuation placed on receiving a good or some cash at an earlier date compared with receiving it at a later date. HODLing is a low time preference action
