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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @fourrules OP 3h \ parent \ on: Is tokenisation a bad word in bitcoin maxi circles bitcoin
Very strange comment.
I take some of your points, but in a multi-polar world a bitcoin standard is inevitable. The nature of governments is to distrust each other, including their tokens. In that context the dynamics of politics and economics disfavours fiat over the long-term.
I thought that was a basic tenet of being a bitcoin maxi, but maybe there are other kinds of people calling themselves maxis, who think it a maximal moral prerogative to own bitcoin or something like that.
But I assume the decline of the USD must result in the rise of Bitcoin BY factoring the significance of nation states and political power structures.
China can't issue the world reserve currency without hollowing out it's own manufacturing base the way the US did, which it needs to pacify it's massive labour force. Revolutions in China are extremely ugly. In that context no other country with accept the yuan as the denominator of debt or medium of international settlement. You are a very rare soul if you think that is the trajectory we're on.
Why would the US need to impose it's will on China for a combination of a bitcoin-gold standard to emerge in international trade? Surely it's the opposite, a bitcoin-gold standard emerges from a weak US.
I also perfectly understand that if a Bitcoin Standard monetary system were to succeed the USD the nature of the system would fundamentally change- student loans would no longer be a practical method of funding education- as traditional debt markets would no longer be a means by which the state and banks could issue capital funding, hence tokenisation would dominate.
The rest of your comment has very little relationship with my comments, I would find it difficult to respond, it's very confused.
You ignore the massive power that fiat delivers governments versus the massive LOSS of POWER that a Bitcoin Standard implies.
The USA today is demonstrably ONLY viable because of its addiction to the fiat debt issuance that is the extraordinary privilege derived from being the issuer of the global reserve currency- and the USD being a full fiat construct.
Under a Bitcoin Standard that extraordinary privilege evaporates and the USA would be very swiftly insolvent- being unable to sustain both trade and fiscal deficits that have become chronic over the last 50 years.
In contrast China today dominates global trade in manufactured goods and commodities.
China can and has already demonstrated that the USA is dependent upon its supply chains.
Most US military supply chains are now dependent upon Chinese supply chains.
If China turns them off USA is unable to make the weapons and systems it relies upon to dominate global institutions, resources, law and protocols.
China has in turn built its mercantile dominance upon sound application of fiat money- many BTC Maxis may not understand that fiat applied with discipline and strategy is a potent economic leveraging tool. The Chinese government has consistently used fiat monetary leverage to direct capital toward productive assets and infrastructure- in contrast the US has allowed bankers to allocate an ever increasing ratio of fiat debt issuance toward non productive speculative assets - primarily real estate- which becomes a parasitic debt burden.
Monetary dominance has historically always followed from trade and military dominance.
At least since the time of Rome, if not before.
China today dominates global trade.
China must now also gain military dominance to ensure its control over trade routes and commodity supplies.
This process is now unfolding as the US reduces its military power projection and China exerts its own- via proxies like Iran and Russia and via the construction of global trade and transport infrastructure known ans the Belt and Road.
China has no logical need or incentive to adopt a Bitcoin Standard- quite the opposite.
China is also in no hurry to become the issuer of the global reserve currency but to some extent it is already the case that nearly all nations need to trade with China or suffer significant loss of economic advantage due to China paying the best price for commodities and charging the least price for manufactured goods.
With annual trade surpluses of over a Trillion USD China can and is accumulating global strategic assets and the power that goes with that, and allies with military ability, like Russia that enable the enforcement of property rights that is required for a prosperous empire.
It is necessary to think in a different way to the current highly financialised US model of hegemony and think in a more mercantile mindset to understand Chinas strategic approach to gaining global dominance- they will seek to avoid some of the structural pitfalls that the US fell into.
Certainly there may be a marginal case for Bitcoin but given the almost complete success of the commoditisation of Bitcoin and its near complete failure to gain use as a MoE, Bitcoin is marginalised as a speculative commodity and does not look like it will succeed in gaining the dominance of MoE adoption that is needed to a true Bitcoin Standard.
Finally, if a Bitcoin Standard does overcome the state power imperatives that fiat money supports, then a very different economic and monetary model would develop to the highly debt leveraged and dependent financial model that currently operates via the fiat USD.
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I'm not ignoring that at all, in any way. When a person or institution loses power then do it by choice, they don't give it up freely, they just lose it. Circumstances change, the ground shifts beneath their feet, the road runs out and they hit a wall.
The exorbitant privilege of the US government is ending. This is not surprising, it's a system only 50 years old, an aberration, a blip in financial history, a fleeting moment.
That moment is nearly over.
And none of your comments on China logically infer that the yuan will be adopted as a world reserve currency or medium for international settlements, given the exorbitant privilege this would give to China, which has already demolished everyone else's manufacturing base.
China has no logical need or incentive to adopt a Bitcoin Standard- quite the opposite.
China won't have a choice, no more than they had a choice of adopting the US standard. They'll try gold, obviously, but settlement is slow too slow for modern economies and inevitably a new gold standard leads directly to a bitcoin standard, whether the CCP likes it or not.
It is necessary for YOU to think in a different way to understand that the reaction of the incumbent system obviously meant that Bitcoin had to become a store of value before a medium of exchange, but a store of value that has monetary properties will inevitably become a medium of exchange, and then a unit of account.
If a Bitcoin Standard does overcome the state power imperatives that fiat money supports, then a very different economic and monetary model would develop, but people will always bet on the future and tokenisation is the most efficient vehicle for debt markets.
I don't think you have a good grasp of this topic so this is my last comment.
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The Yuan is already being increasingly adopted for settlement of international trade.
Iran, N.Korea and Russia now settle most of their trade via Chinas rapidly developing alternative trade payments protocols including CIPS and mBridge via which China has partnered with UAE, Thailand and HongKong.
The Saudis have joined mBridge and if they continue to increase their sales of oil in other than USD denominations then the end of the petrodollar is imminent and it does not result in the increased use of Bitcoin for settlement.
Bitcoin MoE use is virtually non existent, after more than 15 years the protocol is stuck in a narrative of NGU speculative commodity capture and control by bankers and governments who are not at all threatened by another speculative commodity swelling the demand for their fiat debt issuance.
Just like Trump hopes stable coin dollar can sustain demand for USTs while the Saudis and others lose interest in them...USA needs to sell many trillions in USTs to just remain viable over the next 12 months and after that the outlook does not improve!
The regaining of Hong Kong sovereignty by China has been crucial to the reverse engineering of the monetary hegemony the west imposede upon China at the start of of Opium Wars an which resulted in Chinas 'one hundreds years of humiliation'.
The IMF, World Bank, SWIFT and BIS are ignorant of the volumes of trade now settled via Chinas alternative trade payments protocols because they do not have access to or control over them.
BIS did quite recently distance itself from mBridge when it realised mBridge now being at an operational level of development poses an existential threat to the legacy US global trade payments hegemony that the BIS is part of.
China does not need to fall into the trap the US did of suffering chronic trade surpluses due to dominating global trade and trade payments- all that is required is to maintain a competitive economy and not become corrupted by the extraordinary privilege of systemic dominance.
For example acquisition of an increasing range of strategic offshore assets can absorb surpluses...and this is exactly what the Chinese have been doing.
You don't seem not understand history, monetary dynamics, political structures and consequences and like many Maxis seem to think Bitcoin Standard and continued US dominance is inevitable. Good luck with that. It is far from inevitable. A Bitcoin Standard if it does develop removes debt issuance power from governments and banks. Get your head around that one at the very least...difficult as it might be given the current system.
The wealth of nations is fundamentally and intricately related to the quality and strength of their governments and their ability to project power and preserve access to resources and markets. Fiat money can be sued to leverage that process- Bitcoin cannot.
Bitcoin would result in a neutral MoE for trade and that would result in a more free trade internationally, but that is unlikely to develop due to the political imperatives and requirements for military and strategic control over logistics and infrastructure.
Just one example for you that demonstrates how empires contest trade access and logistics- Trumps proxies Blackrock regaining US control over Panama canal ports reduces the ability for Venezuela to ship its heavy crude to Chinese refineries which would unleash another very large source of fossil fuel energy to power the Chinese empire additional to its already acquired Iranian and Russian tributaries.
Thinking monetary dominance can be solely an algorithm driven process is naive of real world trade, politics and history.
The decline of the US empire is certainly not being done 'by choice' but rather because of the extraordinary sense of entitlement that has developed in the US culture- the US Exceptionalism that delusionally believes US dominance is the natural order of things- this sort of hyperbole is exactly what commonly signals the end is nigh for an empire.
Very few US citizens realise what is happening let alone accept it, as is evidenced by comments and dialogues like the one you are proposing.
Trump does appear to have some awareness of the problem but also faces the reality that politically and culturally the US is far too divided and riven with corruption to respond in any manner better than damage control, at best.
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