this assumes USD hegemony is a distant memory. does bitcoin have the largest weapons cache and standing military in the history of humanity?
best of luck to your imagined future; but it reads very naive to me.
best of luck to your imagined future; but it reads very naive to me.
call me when you can trade and refine oil purely in bitcoin. no one accepting bitcoin to buy things is holding that bitcoin.
I beg every blockchain as money people to please, please obsess over monetary theory first!!
So the US controls those international settlement rails, what does it do with that power to control BTC? Like I said, they can lean on governments, but those governments don't really have the power to ban it internally, so what can it really do with that leverage?
Did they? The war is in a stalemate. Militarily this isn't that different than the proxy wars of the Cold War EXCEPT Russia has suffered more casualties by a magnitude or two than the USSR did in Afghanistan or the US in Vietnam. For the Russian regime this war is now 100% an existential threat.
For the US from an entirely a real-politik point of view, if the end goal is to defeat Russia dragging the war on might even be a preferable option. After this is over Russian will be militarily crippled for the next 10-20 years due to massive and unsustainable manpower and economic costs. The balance of power will tip even further towards NATO making any further Russian expansion in Eastern Europe impossible (especially now that Finland and Sweden have joined).
Of course Ukraine is caught in between...
For everyone this war is an existential threat. It is unusual for governments that come in after a revolution to be more stable than their predecessors and any successor to Putin will still have the worlds largest nuclear weapons stockpile. There is an outside chance of a literal replay of Germany WWI -> WWII if the Russians collapse. Not to mention the risk of armageddon from the current war; I'd still expect to get another Able Archer style story to add to the near misses out of this conflict.
And from a realpolitik perspective, sure the US is coming off better than Russia here. But the US isn't coming off well; it's military looks a bit wheezy through all this. If they can't deter the world's 11th largest economy from going to war in NATO's sphere of influence; what can they deter? If they can't muster the resources to turn back the Russians in 2023, what are they going to be able to pull in Africa, the middle east and APAC region?
EDIT Bearing in mind we're talking about someone trading Bitcoin in a way they don't like. "this assumes USD hegemony is a distant memory. does bitcoin have the largest weapons cache and standing military in the history of humanity?" is just bunk. They don't have that sort of power these days.
True but "only" because Russia has nukes (you certainly have an extremely valid point about that). However despite WWI Germany was still one of the (or the) economically strongest powers in Europe and the whole world. Besides oil and other raw resources the Russian economy is a joke. Due to their demographic issues and the mass casualties in this war they wouldn't even have the manpower to pull off something even remotely similar to what Germany did. So their only tool they'll have left is "do what we want or we'll blow up the entire world" (and you can only get so far with that..)
> it's military looks a bit wheezy through all this
It it their military itself or rather their "soft"/diplomatic power? It doesn't really matter how strong your conventional army is if you and your opponents know that you won't/can't use it?
> in NATO's sphere of influence
Prior to 2014 Ukraine was certainly in Russia's sphere of influence. This whole thing started because Ukraine (mostly peacefully) was trying to leave it and US/NATO didn't really want to get involved that much into the whole situation until it was too late. So I'm not sure it's that clear cut.
> Bearing in mind we're talking about someone trading Bitcoin in a way they don't like. "this assumes USD hegemony is a distant memory. does bitcoin have the largest weapons cache and standing military in the history of humanity?" is just bunk. They don't have that sort of power these days.
I don't agree with the whole premise. The ability of the US to project military power these days is only somewhat tangentially related to its (and the Dollar's) global economic and financial dominance. They most certainly can more or less stop "trading Bitcoin in a way they don't like" without firing a shot it's just the the cost of doing that is not (yet) worth the effort. AFAIK China is not that eager to switch to bitcoin either (and without China, US, Europe and their allies you only have non particularly economically relevant third tier countries/economies left).
Possibly. Given how much of the rest of the Russian forces turned out to be paper tigers, I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of the missiles' flight computers are missing something flight critical and 80% of the warheads have unenriched (or even outright depleted) uranium instead of weapons grade uranium or plutonium, with the real stuff having been lost (or never made in the fist place) due to corruption, and the SLBMs… well, thinking of replaying history, the Kursk comes to mind.
And while I don't think much of the promises of western anti-ICBM defences, they're probably still at least a bit better than the Russian delivery mechanisms.
Certainly possible that we'll see a repeat of Germany WWI -> WWII when the Russians collapse, I think that fear was why the west tried to be supportive of Russia when the USSR collapsed.
> "this assumes USD hegemony is a distant memory. does bitcoin have the largest weapons cache and standing military in the history of humanity?" is just bunk.
Sure. "Largest weapons cache" is too vague anyway — anyone can tell that the number of longbows don't matter too much any more, but sometimes we get people surprised that battleships also don't matter any more.
(Also: I thought the largest standing army was China, anyway?)
Are these the missiles that Russia ran out of in March 2022, March 2023 and then in June 2023 or the other ones?
I suspect that people are a little more cautious about corruption whenever the results are regularly tested, e.g. if they think the missile they make this month gets shipped to the front line next month, and if it doesn't launch they will be personally posted to a flood-prone trench near a dam in the Dnipro river.
ICBMs are supposed to not get launched outside of tests, they're meant to defend a country by their mere existence threatening mutually assured destruction. This doesn't work so well if people (like me) openly doubt they work. It also means that corruption is much easier to hide, which in turn means it's much more likely to happen. (This latter point also applies to the USA's arsenal, FWIW, but that only matters to the extent that anyone fears the USA collapsing into its second real civil war).
It does show two things: US hegemony over certain European countries that might want to take Russian money and gas is weak, and the US foreign policy coherence is weak as Ukraine policy is at risk from cranks.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12040
• 39 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS);
• 12 National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS); 1 Patriot air defense battery; other air defense systems; and 21 air surveillance radars;
• 31 Abrams tanks, 45 T-72B tanks and 186 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles;
• 300 M113 and 189 Stryker Armored Personnel Carriers;
• 2,000+ Stinger anti-aircraft missiles;
• 10,000+ Javelin and 90,000+ other anti-armor systems;
• Phoenix Ghost, Switchblade, and other UAS;
• 198 155 mm and 72 105 mm Howitzers and artillery;
• 227 mortar systems;
• Remote Anti-Armor Mine (RAAM) Systems;
• 9,000+ Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire- Guided (TOW) missiles;
• High-speed anti-radiation missiles (HARMs) and laser- guided rocket systems;
• 35,000+ grenade launchers and small arms;
• communications, radar, and intelligence equipment; and
• training, maintenance, and sustainment.
(What's NOT on that list? Aircraft. What's the US doctrine way of winning a war, such as OIF? Air power.)
Edit: Do you think no aircraft because they'd have to use US trained pilots?
Now I've got 2 persapectives here. There is "largest weapons cache and standing military in the history of humanity" from pyvpx and there is this rather smaller list from yourself. I'm inclined to go with your list - I don't think the US is in a position to deploy the largest weapons cache in the history of humanity.
The evidence we have is that the US is broke and only capable of bullying people with this rather less impressive list of ad-hoc assembled gear with no air support. Which is not nothing, but has observably failed to turn back the Russians. They don't have the industrial or financial foundations to project do-what-I-say strength overseas any more against larger economies like Russia.
It is pretty obvious they don't have that capability, or they'd have used it.
We're all lucky that the US hasn't dropped the hammer on Russia. A hot war between two major nuclear powers wouldn't / won't end well for anyone.
I will never understand how people fault crypto for not somehow magically solving the world's financial ills, as if humanity has ever had another (successful) plan for wealth distribution. How's that communism working out?
Crypto is meant to solve the trustless distributed ledger problem, nothing more, nothing less. Expecting human nature to somehow change because of this technology is ridiculous.
I'm not a bitcoin proponent by the way, and am well aware that it has massive downsides like the proof of work energy usage (addressed by proof of stake but often ignored because of bitcoin always taking the spotlight). I'm just sick of people naysaying without understanding the fundamental problem it actually does solve, and pretending there's no value or potential in the technology at all.
History has proven time and time again that sound money requires equivalent work to create.
Except it's extremely unsuited for this purpose despite of what some delusional people might be thinking. No (at at least semi stable) country ever will use bitcoin as their primary reserve asset...
But no, not because I say so but because it's obvious if you have at least a cursory understanding of the international monetary system works.
> But no, not because I say so but because it's obvious
Okay, so not because you say so but because you think so :)
Well.. I mean it's a bit like the "climate change is fake" or "5G causes cancer" people. Getting into a serious argument with them only legitimizes their viewpoints and makes them seem just as valid for not good reason..
- 5G causes cancer
- bitcoin is a scam
Your substantive and well-reasoned argument fits right in with that list ;)
That what you said, please don't put words into my mouth. My only point is that bitcoin (or crypto in general) would make a horrible currency if widely adopted. And it has nothing to do with any technical limitations related to bitcoin, extremely deflationary tokens just make a horrible currency (unless no growth, deflation and a permanent economic depression).
> Your substantive and well-reasoned argument
It certainly wasn't intended to be perceived as such.
(trying to make well-reasoned arguments when arguing with quasi-religious fanatics is a waste of time.. ).
Bitcoin is extremely deflationary. Imagine (or read a history book) a society in which almost all wealth/income is derived from land (a "deflationary" asset the value of which only increases as population grows and 95%+ of it is inherited).
Bitcoin is that just much worse because unlike in the case of land you don't need labor and significant capital investment to make any money from it you can just hoard it get richer without doing anything, which means:
- no economic growth (why invest in anything economically productive but risky when you can just get richer by doing nothing)
- eventually 90%+ of all wealth will become inherited and people who were born poor/disadvantage will remember these times as a lost utopia.
> It’s a pretty bad deal for most people.
Yes and even if bitcoin is a "better deal" for you it will be a significantly worse deal long term for the people who follow you..
If you have a growing economy (of course not a concern it bitcoin would replace Fiat currencies) it's extremely deflationary. The supply of money has to grow at least at the same pace as the demand for it, otherwise bad things happen...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.2325-8012....