The first country that starts pricing its oil exports in bitcoin will a) cause the price to initially skyrocket, and b) create a stabilizing force on the price that percolates to all other goods and services.
And the interesting thing, is that because bitcoin is energy money, there is a very direct and explicit correlation to the amount of bitcoin you can earn from using your energy to mine, which can then allow an exporter to trivially calculate the price they are willing to sell their energy for (slightly more than they can net from mining).
The dollar is the stable global reserve currency largely because the US has used its military might to violently coerce oil exporters to price their oil in dollars. Once that happens peacefully with bitcoin, the US dollar will regress back to a local currency used to control its own population and bitcoin will be the fair, global reserve asset used for international trade.
b) China, while increasingly powerful, is not the whole world. If the rest of the world decides that bitcoin is the only viable fair global reserve currency that doesn't disproportionately benefit some global empire, then they'll eventually be forced to come along for the ride, and will be hurt from their decision to take themselves out of the game in the early days.
If it happened for those metals, why do you think it's so unbelievable that it can happen for a superior form of digital gold?
Until we came up with better ways to provide payment for goods and services.
Your description of the petrodollar is borderline conspiratorial as well. And even within your reasoning, the US Navy will beat ASIC mining machines 100% of the time. How could it happen "peacefully" ?
This is only because mining ASICs have rapidly developed towards state of the art chip fabrication, making each generation a huge jump in hashes per watt efficiency. Now that state of the art mining chips are 5nm, the regular obsoleting of old chips is likely to drastically slow down and you'll be able to make profit from old machines for a much longer time if you treat them well.
> electricity transfer is not free, so large scale centralized bitcoin mining will require additional power generation facility
This is a very odd statement. One of the magical things about bitcoin mining as an electricity consumer is that it is one of the most modular and delocalized customers of electricity ever created in human civilization. You can drop small pods of miners right next to every electricity producer on the planet with a satellite connection. Some miners are deploying these small units to oil extractors to use their flared natural gas, which then allows oil producers to a) generate income on wasted gas when it's not economical to transport via pipes or liquefied natural gas and b) burn the nat gas more efficiently than flaring, which reduces global methane emissions (a GHG 100x more potent than CO2 that eventually degrades in to long lasting CO2).
Moreover, bitcoin miners will soon be deployed to new electricity producers to help them start generating money before transmission lines and grid capacity are funded and built out. I and many others think this is why bitcoin will soon become the tip of the spear in accelerating energy buildout.
> the US Navy will beat ASIC mining machines 100% of the time. How could it happen "peacefully"
The US military is not obviously an enemy of bitcoin, and may actually turn into a strong supporter. https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-btc-national-securit...
archive link, https://archive.ph/wfesI
This is mostly nonsense. Energy provides a consistent price floor for mining Bitcoin. That has little relevance to its traded price. If energy prices triple, that doesn't mean Bitcoin prices have to triple as well. It just makes mining at lower prices unprofitable. If nobody wants to buy Bitcoins at the breakeven price, mining just stops--it doesn't magic demand into existence.
And in the future flipped world I'm talking about, where in order to buy energy you need to have bitcoin, there is no "buying" bitcoin. Bitcoin is the primary money that you need to have to buy energy. And if you don't have it, then energy producers use their energy to mine it.
At that point, it ceases to be a speculative asset and becomes the key unit of account for civilization that doesn't depend on the enforcement of the monopoly on violence.
So when you say "bitcoin is energy money," that's a tautology. It's energy money if oil is priced in bitcoin.
> that doesn't depend on the enforcement of the monopoly on violence
Violence relieves someone of their Bitcoin keys just as easily as it does their dollars or gold. (At the very least, you can permanently sequester them.)
Wrong. It is significantly more complicated to use violence to steal bitcoin from people than it is to use violence to steal dollars or gold. With bitcoin, I need to coerce you to give it to me. That could mean torture, sure, but do exist multisig key structures that make it impossible to steal bitcoin by coercing a single person.
On the other hand, if I want your gold, I just shoot you in the head and spend however long it takes to rummage through you house to find where you stashed it. I don't need to coerce your mind to give it to me.
This might seem like a small difference, but it's a hugely important one. It completely changes the economic calculation for the use of violence. Violence is a risky endeavor for any perpetrator and only continues if the economic rewards of engaging in violence outweigh the risks. Bitcoin increases the cost, which necessarily should decrease the incidence.
What if mom says no internet heroin this month and won't sign that transaction? Or refuses to sign any transaction at all?
If you monetarily reward terrorism and torture, you can expect it to continue happening over and over again, because it's economically viable.
I'm not going to point to them. But there are numerous videos where, at the end of a coup, the deposed executive is held at gunpoint while the incoming regime demands account numbers at the America, Swiss, et cetera banks where the money is held.
Swapping that to a crypto wallet just makes the extortion instantly verifiable and irrevocable. It's decreasing the cost of violent seizure.
Bitcoin isn't energy anything. The energy required to print bitcoins has been expended in the process of printing the bitcoins.
Distribution of new coins and transactions fees are simply the reward for that service.
It certainly is.
Everything worth doing costs energy.
Who are you to tell us it's not? Are you going to kill us to stop us from using energy in this way?
When you start talking about policing how people use energy, you start down a very dark path.
Circular economy.
Year after year for the 13 years of bitcoin's existence, people have been saying ABC will never happen, and then it happens. You're worshiping a god of the gaps that gets smaller and smaller with each passing year, while bitcoin only grows stronger.
You could still be right, and finally after years of defying the haters, bitcoin is on the verge of collapse and its growth and integration into civilization will halt. Historical performance is no guarantee of future results and all that.
But maybe it's just getting started.
IOW, "BTC printer goes brrr"
https://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/7c08d81e119570792648...
What matters more is acceptance as a method of savings.
It's not a technical problem, it's about human behavior
When is a permissioned system better than a permissionless? (and the opposite)
I'm excited for the next steps of stable coins.
People always ask "What if Tether isn't 100% backed by Dollar?!"
The more interesting question is "What if the Dollar is shit?!"
"...do...do you not know how the actual dollar works..."
https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/audited-annual-fi...
- state monopoly on violence
and
- one of the world's largest economies
Tether is backed up by?