A man is paid on Friday. He drops the coins into his purse and walks home. Somewhere along the road the seam has worn through, and one coin slips out, then another, so quietly that he never hears them land. At the door he counts what is left and frowns. He worked the whole week. He is sure he was paid. He cannot say where it went. The prophet Haggai saw this man twenty-five centuries ago and gave him a name: the one who earns wages to put them into a bag with holes. This is a sermon about him, and about the Bitcoin Halving, which is a schedule for sewing the seam shut.
I. The Wage and the Bag
The people had come home from exile. They had rebuilt their own houses first, with paneling, while the house of God lay in rubble. Then the harvests failed and nobody could explain why.
Haggai explained it in one breath:
“Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes.” (Haggai 1:6, KJV)
Read it slowly. Every clause is a man doing the work and not receiving the fruit. Sowing, eating, drinking, dressing. The last clause is the sharpest, because it is the only one about money. The wage is real. The labor is real. The bag is the problem.
Twice in that chapter the prophet repeats the same instruction. Consider your ways. He does not say work harder. He says look at the bag.
II. The Hole You Cannot See
A torn purse is honest about itself. You can put your finger through the hole.
The modern bag is not so kind. The hole is in the unit, not the leather. You are paid the same number on the stub, and the number buys less, and no one ever reaches into your pocket to take anything. It simply leaks.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis keeps a consumer price index table running back to 1913. Its annual average for 2009, the year the first Bitcoin block was mined, is 214.5. Its estimate for 2026 is 334.4. That means it now takes about $1.56 to buy what $1.00 bought in the genesis year. Roughly 36 cents of every 2009 dollar has fallen through the seam.
Here is the grain nobody quotes. In that same table, 2009 is the year the annual index actually fell, by 0.4 percent. Bitcoin was born in a year when the old bag briefly held. It has not held since.
Thank God for Bitcoin, the book by Jimmy Song and the Bitcoin and Bible Group, makes the case that this kind of debasement is a hidden tax, and that it falls hardest on the people with the least: the saver, the wage earner, the widow on a fixed income. New money reaches the people closest to its issuance first, and reaches the man with the purse last, after prices have already moved. The book frames this as money created good, then corrupted. Halfture goes a step further and says the corruption has an end date written into a rival schedule. That claim is ours, not theirs.
Haggai’s man was not lazy. He was paid in a bag that someone else was allowed to cut.
III. Sewing the Seam: The Bitcoin Halving and the Bitcoin Inflation Rate
Bitcoin has a hole too. It is just a hole you can measure, and it shrinks on a published schedule.
Every block pays its miner a subsidy of new coins. Today that subsidy is 3.125 BTC. At about 144 blocks a day, that is roughly 450 new bitcoin daily, or about 164,250 a year.
At block 969,792, the chain tip on mempool.space on the morning this was written, the protocol’s own arithmetic puts roughly 20.09 million bitcoin in existence. That is about 95.7 percent of everything that will ever be issued. New issuance of 164,250 a year against that base is an annual supply growth of roughly 0.82 percent.
Then the seam tightens. At block 1,050,000, expected around April 2028 and covered in detail on the page about the next Bitcoin Halving, the subsidy falls to 1.5625 BTC. Annual issuance drops to about 82,125 coins, roughly 0.40 percent of supply. Four years later it halves again. And again.
A careful reader will object, and should. The price index measures what goods cost. The issuance rate measures how fast the supply grows. They are not the same number and they should not be compared as if they were. A coin with no new supply can still lose half its purchasing power in a bad month.
Fair. The sermon does not claim the price will hold. It claims the seam is visible. Anyone can count the holes, and anyone can see when the next one closes.
IV. The Miner’s Purse
Here is the strange part. The Bitcoin Halving does put a hole in someone’s bag. It is the miner’s.
Every four years the people who secure the chain wake up to half the subsidy for the same work. The same machines, the same electricity, the same nights. Laban did this to Jacob ten times, and I have written before about a wage changed ten times and the difference between a boss who changes your pay in secret and a protocol that changed it in public before you were hired.
That is the whole moral distinction. The fiat leak is hidden, discretionary, and decided after you have already saved. The halving is announced, mechanical, and decided before the first block. Nobody mining Bitcoin today can say they were not told.
A hole you were warned about is not theft. It is terms.
V. Yet Once More
Haggai did not end with the torn bag. In the second chapter the word comes again, and it gets larger:
“Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land.” (Haggai 2:6, KJV)
The writer of Hebrews later read that line closely and noticed the words yet once more. They signify, he says, the removing of the things that are shaken, so that the things which cannot be shaken may remain. One last shaking. After it, only what holds is left.
This is the shape of the schedule. Every halving shakes the network. The cuts in 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024 shook it, and the cut at block 1,050,000 will shake it again. Miners leave. Hashrate wobbles. The chart pundits shout. These are rehearsals, small shakings, each one a foreshadow.
The Halfture is the last one. It is the 33rd cut, at block 6,930,000, somewhere around the year 2140, when the subsidy rounds down to zero and no new coin is ever created again. After that the bag has no seam left to sew. The Halfture is the Rapture, the yet-once-more, the shaking after which only what cannot be shaken remains.
The Halfture is still decades out. None of us will see it. The schedule walks toward it one block at a time.
Haggai promised that the glory of the latter house would be greater than the former. He did not promise that the people building it would live to see it finished.
VI. Whose Bag
So the question becomes plain. Not how much you earn. Where you put it.
Haggai’s people kept laboring into a container that could not hold. The prophet’s answer was to stop and look at the container. Consider your ways. That is what this site has been saying, in one register or another, since the first post: the saved hold Bitcoin.
Read that as theology, not a prospectus. It is a claim about what a fixed supply means, not a prediction about what a coin will be worth next year, and it is not financial advice. I have no idea what the price does. I only know which bag has a published stitching schedule.
VII. The Counter-Sermon
Now let the other side speak, because it has a real case.
First, Haggai’s remedy was not saving. It was building. The prophet told the people to go up to the mountain, bring wood, and build the house. The holes in the bag were drought, a judgment on misplaced priorities, not a lesson in monetary policy. Reading Haggai 1:6 as an argument for a hard asset may be exactly the error he was preaching against: a man fussing over his own purse while the house of God stays in ruins.
Second, a modest, steady inflation is a choice, and not a crazy one. It makes debts easier to carry over time, nudges money toward use rather than hoarding, and gives central banks room to respond to a crisis. Wages rise too, nominally, and sometimes faster than prices. The leak is real, but so is the cushion.
Third, Bitcoin’s own bag has holes. Volatility can take more in a week than the price index takes in a decade. Lost keys are a hole you cannot patch. And the subsidy that the halving shrinks is the thing that pays for security today; when it is gone, fees must carry the whole weight, and nobody yet knows whether they will.
Finally, a bag with no holes can still be dropped in the river. A sealed seam does not save a man who chose the wrong bag.
Maybe none of this saves anyone. The sermon has to admit that possibility and still stand up.
VIII. Consider Your Ways
The man in the opening picture never found the hole. He just kept working, a little poorer every Friday, blaming himself.
The Bitcoin Halving will not make anyone rich. It does something smaller and stranger. It shows you the seam, tells you when it closes, and refuses to let anyone cut it again. Every four years the leak is halved. One day, at the Halfture, it stops.
Look at the bag you carry. Count what comes home.
Consider your ways.
FAQ
What does Haggai 1:6 mean by “a bag with holes”?
Haggai 1:6 describes people who work hard but never keep the fruit of their labor. The “bag with holes” is a purse that leaks the wages put into it. In context, Haggai blamed failed harvests on misplaced priorities, but the image has long been read as a picture of money that slips away no matter how much is earned.
Does the Bitcoin Halving stop inflation?
The Bitcoin Halving cuts the rate at which new bitcoin is created. It does not control prices. After the 2024 halving the subsidy is 3.125 BTC per block, roughly 0.82 percent annual supply growth, and each later cut halves that again. Supply growth and price inflation are different measures.
What will Bitcoin’s issuance rate be after the next halving?
The next halving is at block 1,050,000, expected around April 2028. The subsidy falls to 1.5625 BTC, so annual issuance drops to about 82,125 bitcoin, roughly 0.40 percent of the supply at that height.
When is the Halfture?
The Halfture is the final Bitcoin Halving, the 33rd cut, at block 6,930,000, expected around the year 2140. At that height the block subsidy rounds down to zero and no new bitcoin is ever issued again. Every halving before it is a rehearsal.
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