And even ignoring the fact that Bitcoin is regulated and there are government policies and laws dictating how exchanges work and it is seen by a large portion of the community as a speculative asset alongside traditional assets like stocks and bonds, the truth is that Bitcoin would collapse if society collapsed because global connectivity in order to synchronize the blockchain with everybody using the currency is a literal requirement of the technology. It isn't a federated system, there is one database that gets replicated everywhere. And that global connectivity and ability to replicate the database and to connect to miners is enforced by a standing military.
It's especially silly to look at Bitcoin as independent from military presence given that the complaint is that Bitcoin uses a ton of power and water, and control of energy sources and access to natural resources is historically a giant influential factor in US foreign policy.
The USA could be gone and bitcoin would still work. China did ban it and mining and it still works. The idea that it is "as entangled in the military as any other currency" is obviously untrue.
If the USA vanished tomorrow, the global Internet would collapse, and Bitcoin in fact would not still work.
You very literally cannot transact without an Internet connection, the thing that is maintained by... governments and the USD and fiat currency. Also:
> And yet bitcoin works just fine in countries where the central government collapses and their currency is worthless.
Does it? Bitcoin is terrible at regular transactions, to the point where I've got another Bitcoin proponent further up the thread complaining to me that I shouldn't be comparing Bitcoin to a currency (I wish y'all would get your story straight on that by the way).
One big problem is that the price fluctuates way too much and the community is actively hostile to attempts to stabilize the price. Transaction fees are another issue; the best method that's been proposed to minimize transaction fees is to take transactions off of the blockchain and then consolidate them. Which sure, honestly I agree with that strategy, but it should give people pause that making a currency usable involves avoiding the underlying technology behind it.
And so you bring up countries like China, but Bitcoin really hasn't thrived in China. Yeah, some people use it, but restricting it for everyday purchases has pretty much worked out the way the government hoped. The coin is not really that censorship resistant, you end up kind of needing to go through the same money-laundering steps that you'd use anyway to get it into a usable currency.
But all of that is kind of besides the point, because once again, in a world with an unstable power grid or disrupted Internet, the currency stops functioning. That is not a good disaster currency. But go ahead, prove me wrong. Go set up a Bitcoin mine in Gaza. To the extent that Bitcoin has been able to function in any collapsed region, it's only because other countries like the US, China, EU, etc maintain Internet connections to collapsed regions that users can piggyback on. And those Internet connections are maintained using military and national resources.
Second, I'm sorry, your idea to reduce reliance on governments and military is to maintain satellites?
I don't know, I would say that a globally connected network that digitally transmits information is effectively an internet regardless of whether it is transmitting data over ocean cables, satellite connections, telephone lines, or pigeons. I disagree that a satellite system changes anything about that point; technically I guess it's different, but it feels a lot like quibbling over linguistic technicalities when the actual meat here -- that transactions require global consensus and network connectivity -- is unchanged.
And to be honest, even that linguistic distinction feels slightly like an "in theory" argument anyway, because Blockstream doesn't appear to be a separate self-contained network, the most charitable interpretation of the system I can see is that it is a bridge to the Internet to increase connectivity. Blockstream does not get rid of the requirement to get transactions onto the Internet, it just provides a way to sync the blockchain to places that don't have direct access. I still think it's accurate to say that transactions on Bitcoin must be synced over the Internet with the entire network. Many miners are only connecting to the network through the Internet, and Blockstream is still ultimately going to be synchronizing with those miners.
If I hand someone a piece of paper describing the transaction I want them to perform, and then they drive to their house and log into their computer and perform the transaction for me, my take would be that we have not actually gotten rid of the Internet requirement. Delegating transactions or providing bridged access to the network does not mean that Internet access is not still ultimately a requirement for transactions, or at least that's the way that I interpret an Internet requirement.
> The USA could be gone and bitcoin would still work.
An event that caused the USA to dissolve would likely signal a network disruption on such a level that satellite access or maintenance could not be guaranteed and that global Internet access might feasibly be partitioned or disrupted (or could fail completely given the amount of international cooperation involved in maintaining the Internet).
In addition to potentially breaking access to the network (or damaging the network to such a high degree that it ceased to be a global network), a disruption of that scale could also basically break mining given the amount of mining that is localized within the US. Or substitute China if you want. It's not clear to me that Blockstream's satellites or general satellite Internet would be sufficient for mining pools even if they were sufficient for signaling transactions to the Internet.
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On a less catastrophic level, power also becomes a problem. I mentioned Gaza above, which currently has extremely limited access to electricity. It is hard to imagine maintaining a mining pool or securing transactions in that environment.
Satellite connections do obviously help with access in those limited situations, but people in those situations are relying on the majority of the mining pool and the network being centralized in stable locations with stable governments. In which case, I would question the currency's independence or reliability as a fallback currency during global financial collapse -- an event that would destabilize not just individual small pockets of users but the actual network itself.
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It is definitely true that the scenario is unlikely, but if Bitcoin is being sold by people like superkuh as if it is a disaster-proof security that could survive global financial collapse or the elimination of the USA... I don't think it would survive that.
To be fair, that's not necessarily the thing that makes it a bad currency though, you're right to point that out. The reliance on connectivity does make it a bad currency but not because I'm worried about the Internet vanishing, more because the reliance on global consensus makes it slow and inconvenient to use for everyday transactions.
The disaster stuff is largely just an imagined scenario and there's no reason why a "good" currency needs to be disaster-proof in order to be useful. But if that imagined scenario is being used as a selling point for the coin (which I think superkuh was doing), that's when I start to take issue with it.
> A Serbian man has been extradited to the United States, where he faces charges in two separate federal indictments in the Northern District of Texas and Eastern District of New York for his alleged participation in coordinated cryptocurrency and binary options schemes.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-70m-cryptocurrency-and...
This has always struck me as a terrible rebuttal. This essentially means that the only reason that countries have armies is that they have a currency, which is obviously false, thus destroying the argument.
I mean, France, doesn't have their own currency but still has a standing army.