Who was Baruch de Spinoza? Well, he was a Dutch philosopher born in 1632 and died in 1677 at the age of 45.

Of Jewish faith, he was a member of the Portuguese Sephardic community descended from the Marranos forced to leave Spain by the Catholics in the 15th century, he was brought up in a religious and intellectual environment, aware of what it means to be persecuted.

In fact, from an early age, he showed a strongly critical spirit towards established religion, and in particular towards his Hebrew community, from which he was violently rejected in 1656, aged just 24, before he had published anything.

This "excommunication", it is said, allowed him to isolate himself and focus on his work without ever looking back.

An heir, like his contemporaries Descartes (1596-1650), Pascal (1632-1662) and Newton (1643-1727), to the new rational ideas in the physics of Copernicus (1473-1543), Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo (1564-1642), who preceded him by just a few years, Spinoza developed a way of thinking in the manner of the geometers, in accordance with Galileo's principle that mathematics is the language of the universe.

But these were very dangerous ideas for the time, after the trial of the monk and philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who was burnt alive for heresy in a public square in Rome, and the trial of Galileo, forced by the inquisition in 1633 to renounce his Copernican heliocentric convictions.

This is why his strictly rational vision of the world and human nature, based on the causal connections between things, earned him the reputation of being considered, and still is today, wrongly, an atheist.

In fact, Spinoza's work speaks only of God, whom he identifies with Nature, and while he criticizes the superstitious impulses of religious people and theocrats, he shows that true religion for him is above all synonymous with justice and charity.

And it is this approach that links Spinoza to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, whether German, with Leibniz (1646-1716), Kant (1724-1804), Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Nietzsche (1844-1900), English with Locke (1632-1704) or French with Voltaire (1694-1778), Rousseau (1712-1778) and Diderot (1713-1784). All agreed that reason should be used to combat obscurantism, especially religious obscurantism, to fight ignorance and to defend the ideals of freedom and progress.

Now, to begin connecting this philosophy with Bitcoin, it's important to note that Spinoza was born in a very particular era.

In the 17th century, the United Provinces were not only the freest country in the world in terms of political and religious ideas, but also the wealthiest. In other words, the most economically and technologically advanced country.

Wealth, however, is not tied to natural resources, the exploitation and despoliation of colonies or slavery, but to international trade and commerce in a liberal, entrepreneurial spirit. A spirit later championed by a famous Spinozist, Voltaire (1694-1778), for whom, in a trading room, a businessman or entrepreneur of liberal persuasion would never be excluded, called an infidel or excommunicated, he said, on the basis of his religion or origins, but only if he had gone bankrupt.

What's more, Holland at that time was also advanced in major technological fields, for example in the fields of mechanics and optics. The astronomical telescopes used by Galileo to look up at the sky and discover the universe were indeed considered cutting-edge technology for their era, as are the new technologies associated with computing, AI and, of course, crypto today.

And as Spinoza himself practiced the trade of polishing astronomical lenses - ironically for someone said to have seen everything askew - we can imagine that he would certainly have supported a tool of freedom like Bitcoin.

In other words, the values of freedom and progress conveyed by Spinozism stand in contrast to a world where religious fundamentalism, conspiracy theories, superstition, and, above all, ignorance remain a sad reality.

Yet it is a world in which every means is valuable for escaping, for freeing ourselves from the servitudes that confine us, and for being free by accepting the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

Whether these means are philosophical or technological, as we shall see later, Bitcoin is a tool of freedom. It's a tool that enables both individuals and states alike to free themselves from servitude, particularly monetary servitude.