Khadeejah Milhan

Bitcoin and the Quran

By Fardeem Munir

Crisp winter air swept through San Francisco and I found myself in the office of a posh Silicon Valley cryptocurrency company. Tech bros filled the air with mentions of blockchain and something about uprooting the world’s financial system. Ah, techno optimism - how I love thee. I had spent the previous summer immersed in blockchain technology, the underlying system that powers Bitcoin, Ethereum and all other cryptocurrencies so I felt at home. After a restless night, I began to doze off during a presentation about how their blockchain system works when it suddenly occurred to me: Oh my God, the Quran and Hadith sciences are blockchain based systems very similar to Bitcoin. Wait, what is Bitcoin again?

Most people treat bitcoin as a trading instrument. You buy it for some price and hope the price increases so you can make a profit . In this sense, it’s a lot like gambling. However, the existence of Bitcoin is much deeper than that. Just like the dollar is the currency of the United States, Bitcoin is the currency of the Internet.

The Making of a Currency There is one key thing any currency needs to get right: the double-spending problem. If you give Willie the Wildcat 10$, you should no longer have that 10$. This is easy if you are transacting using cash. The physical piece of paper actually has to change hands. Over the internet however, Money, like all other data, is just a string of 1s and 0s. You can copy that a bunch of times over and make yourself a millionaire. “But how does Venmo do it?” Ah, Venmo. Venmo or any other bank, solves the double spending problem by introducing themselves as a middlemen. They solely exist to be a central authority to make sure when you send money to Willie, it moves from your account to Willie’s But, central authorities suck! Why can you talk to someone across the world but not freely send them money? Your bank will block transactions and freeze your account if they think the transaction seems fishy. Why can they slap you with obscene fees any moment they can? Oh you want a new card, here’s a fee. You want a new account, yeah $20 for that. It’s ridiculous how much you have to deal with a bank’s wishes and desires considering the money is yours!

On 31 October 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. With that Bitcoin came to life. To this day no one knows who or where Satoshi Nakamoto is. In 2010, he disappeared from the online bitcoin scene never to be heard from. On 3 January 2009, the first transaction on the bitcoin network took place. Bitcoin runs the blockchain, and each transaction is known as a block. This first block had the following message embedded in it: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”

Bitcoin began with the instability of modern finance and a desire to build a better world.

Double Spending on the Blockchain Through a set of rules and systems, The blockchain allows people across the globe to send money to each other without a central authority. Instead of having a central authority, in the blockchain everyone is a central authority. Everyone gets a ledger of transactions and every single transaction on the blockchain network is propagated to everyone’s ledger. The ledger might look like this:

You to Willie the Wildcat 10$ You to Northwestern. Obscene tuition fees Satoshi to Vitalik. 400$

Every transaction is public information. As you can see, double-spending is impossible because anyone can tally up all your transactions and know if you have enough money. But what if I add a line to the ledger like “you give me all your money”? Bitcoin prevents this by using digital signatures which allow everyone in the bitcoin network to look at a transaction and ensure that the sender actually made it. I couldn’t then make transactions from your account. But I still want all your money so I do the following trick: I convince you to give me 10 bitcoins and then I copy that line in the ledger over and over again! Not so fast. When you want to add a line item to this ledger, the following things takes place:

1. You announce the transaction to everyone 2. Each person in the network is constantly listening to new transactions. 3. When they receive news of a transaction, they first check if the sender had enough funds. Then they “mine” the transaction by solving a hard computational puzzle. This is the heart of the network and is known as proof of work. This will become more important in a bit 4. Once a person mines a transaction and creates a block out of it, they tell everyone about the transaction and everyone adds this new line to their ledger

The key to understanding the connection between the Quran and Bitcoin is the notion of Proof of Work -- the notion that you can’t change this distributed ledger without getting everyone on board with your plan.

Quran on the Blockchain

Here’s a thought experiment for you. Let’s say we wake up tomorrow and all the world’s written information whether in print or digital just disappears. All the libraries vanish. Computers, phones, everything:gone. Your beloved books are no longer with you . Your favorite articles and podcasts evaporate out of existence Within the end of day, however, around the world, a copy of the Quran would be reproduced and all of them will be exactly the same. Due to the millions of huffadh, people who memorize the Quran verbatim, even during an informational apocalypse, the Quran will not only be lost but restored in the same way across the world without any centralized communication. Bitcoin wants to be globally distributed and not rely on any central authority. The Quran is all over the world without any central authority controlling its flow of information. The Quran is the same in Japan as it is in Alaska. People who memorize the Quran, called Huffadh, make up the backbone of a “Quran Blockchain”. Being a huffadh is hard and people generally dedicate 2-3 years of full time effort. Similar to the proof of work mechanism employed in blockchain,a hufaddh can’t just change a verse of the Quran because millions of other huffadh are constantly checking their work.

Hadith on the Blockchain

When someone says the Prophet ﷺ said something, how do we really know? How do we know this isn’t something made up? Isn’t it quite a lot like asking if someone on the blockchain network has the amount of money he claims to be paying me? In the blockchain, the ledger keeps track of all the transactions since the beginning of its creation. Every transaction can be traced back to the genesis block. The Hadith tradition has a similar concept: the Isnad. Every single Hadith can be traced back to the Prophet ﷺ in a chain of transmitters. Someone who is trained in hadith will be able to tell you their chain: my teacher heard it from his teacher who heard it from their teacher, all the way back to the Sahabah who heard it from the Prophet ﷺ. It’s interesting how the concept of digital signatures comes into play. We didn’t have computers until very recently but the hadith tradition is 1400 years strong. In the blockchain, we verify each transaction by looking at their signature but in hadith when someone says “so and so told me”, how do we really know? The answer lies in the field of Islamic studies known as `Ilm al-Rijāl. At an Islamic Law class at Northwestern, we were given a bunch of hadith and asked to classify if they were true or not. Along with the chain of transmitters, we were given biographies of each transmitter: when they were born, where they lived and other information. One example of how this plays out is that if two transmitters next to each other in the chain lived on opposite sides of the planet, there is no reason we should accept the hadith.

The Signs of God

This article vastly oversimplifies both blockchain and how Quran and hadith sciences work. You might think the similarities evaporate when you look deeper into both fields. Surprisingly, the opposite is actually true. The more in-depth I have studied the Islamic Tradition and blockchain, I find more and more similarities.

On that chilly day in San Francisco, my realization about the parallels between cryptocurrency and the Islamic tradition shocked me. It took me a whole summer of complicated Math and computer networks to understand blockchain networks. It’s incredible how for 1400 years now the Islamic tradition has been built on a similar network architecture with people all over the world with various levels of education, yet the whole system works flawlessly. There is a reason we call the Quran the book of God.

”The revelation of this Book is from Allah—the Almighty, All-Wise. Surely in the creation of the heavens and the earth are signs for the believers.” [45:2-3]