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0 sats \ 11 replies \ @daolin 18h \ parent \ on: The Risk of Reality Distortion Fields BooksAndArticles
The thing about NGU is that it's a real technology with serious real-world implications. It demands an adaptive response from legacy institutions and it doesn't care about historical precedent. That'll be proven with time. It doesn't matter how many transactions are processed through CIPS if all the participants eventually scramble to store their money in BTC. What does any bank or cross-border payment system offer that Bitcoin doesn't do better?
No political party creates wealth. The best thing they can do for a country is be quiet and tolerate the wealth creation that civilians work for. That might never be definitively proven in this lifetime, but I think it will be very revealing that the currency which enables the best life for civilians is one which was not issued by any government.
The primary utility of money is MoE.
SoV is an important but secondary quality.
If you control trade in manufactured goods and commodities as dominant trade blocs do then you can 'prefer' or demand that settlement is in your currency, as the USA has done with its 'petrodollar' and as all empires have done- because they can.
Trade is the primary driver of wealth.
China now enjoys annual trade surpluses of over One Trillion USD.
USA has suffered chronic trade (and fiscal) deficits for 6 decades.
If you control MoE in trade you have the ability to exclude/sanction opponents- as the USA has done with its SWIFT/Petrodollar hegemony it has enjoyed since the end of Breton Woods.
China naturally seeks to build independent trade payments from the US/USD SWIFT hegemony, and is...via Hong Kong, HSBC, CIPS and mBridge and a rapidly growing stack of gold.
Fiat powers are not much bothered by BTC as a SoV as long as it does not intrude upon their crucial strategic MoE hegemony.
In fact allowing SoV/speculative commodity status for Bitcoin in the west has allowed western bankers to capture a growing proportion of the total BTC issuance and freeze it from use as MoE p2p payments protocol and as time goes by the ability to justify a ban on private custody grows as they could say 'you can still enjoy BTC investment via ETFs'.
BTC moE is banned in most autocracies like China and in the west it is hugely obstructed via tax recording and reporting obligations that follow from its arbitrary classification as a speculative commodity rather than a payments protocol.
see this-
Governments absolutely are responsible for the creation of the conditions whereby private investment can thrive- without good law and order, security and property rights private enterprise is crippled- as you see in so many third world countries where the government is corrupt.
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Bitcoin itself is a more valuable commodity than anything else on the market. Owning Bitcoin is how an entity ensures it has negotiating power in international trade.
When a government tries to ban or regulate the use of BTC, what they're essentially doing is exerting energy to attack private wealth creation/storage among civilians, but it's that same wealth that the government is dependent on to enforce all the bans and regulations.
Imagine I have two sons, and I want to exploit their labor to secure my retirement without working. I tell my firstborn son that he's not allowed to have his own money. Everything he works for, he has to bring to me, and I choose how much I'll allow him to keep and how he can spend it. Meanwhile, I tell my second son that whatever money he earns will belong to him, and he can spend it however he wants.
With my first son, I can use "law an order" as an excuse and tell him it's for his own good, but it's not going to work. Whatever relationship I have with him is going to be a nasty win-lose fight. He's just going to resent me and maybe avoid working entirely out of spite. My second son will end up with more money, and I'll have a better chance getting financial help from him than my first, even though I didn't demand it with an iron fist. The government can't just handwave away the citizenry's desire for privately held wealth.
And yes, to some extent it's true that people are sheep who have varying thresholds of tolerance for abuse, but there's always a limit somewhere. In the case of Bitcoin, as people start to notice that the holders are getting significantly richer than the nocoiners, it's going to be a tough sell for governments to tell civilians that the bans and regulations are for their own good. I mean if I'm an average Beijinger holding Yuans instead of Bitcoin, did the government really make such incredible investments that I don't mind missing out on a 4x? What about a 10x or a 20x? Human nature is a mix of compromising agreeability as well as self-esteem, and I think as NGU keeps playing out, governments that insist on shutting civilians out of it are going to be using up a lot of legitimacy points.
Edit: except Europe. They're doomed, they have no fight. They're destined to be nocoiners. I think China might fight because their respect for the state is at least conditional on economic success. Europeans worship the state like it's a god.
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What you do not accept is that good governments create the conditions where private capital can thrive and invest.
Good governments can do this by -
1- Creating fair and enforced property rights and rule of law.
2- By supporting the development of infrastructure and markets that foster wealth creation while regulating against market capture and cartels and monopolies which otherwise will form.
Without this strategic leadership and provision of secure property rights there is little incentive for private capital to invest- and they will not invest.
It was the British governments strategic development with private interests that built the British Empire- the empire that USA inherited and succeeded when British imperialism became unviable due to the endless warring and division in Europe.
USA inherited the empire and for a time maintained hegemony but today faces the challenge from China where the CCP has built the most competitive productive mercantile economy on the planet.
They allow enterprise as long as it is subservient to the wider advancement of Chinese wealth and prosperity but private capital is kept subservient to the overall project of wealth creation and power projection which they understand is crucial to enduring wealth.
The USA is losing its global hegemony over markets and institutions and protocols and as that hegemony is lost so is the extraordinary wealth and privilege its citizens have enjoyed.
Musk cannot produce EV batteries at the same cost as BYD- BYD can produce EV batteries at almost half the cost Tesla faces- because BYD is operating within the Chinese production and supply chains. Musk was used to help the Chinese market develop and innovate and now he is no longer needed and China can and does produce the best value EVs- this process of cloning and adoption of western tech has been fine tuned over the last 4 decades to the point now where China can and does dominate global manufacturing and commodity supply chains.
Merchants and businesses operate within and behold to the governments and empires and are subject to changes in the structure and operation of empires.
The west has lost the trade war and look like probably losing its legacy advantage in tertiary protocols and institutions- to China.
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Japan has since WW2 been a militarily and monetarily a subservient tribute state to the USA.
Watch Princes of the Yen
China in contrast firstly had to establish secure and true sovereignty which initially was gained from behind the USSR cold war with the west and acquisition of nukes and seizure of Tibet to prevent the west positioning its nukes there.
Only subsequent to the fall of the Berlin wall and death of Mao has China had the national security to develop economically and under Deng they began the process that has since seen the most incredible economic development in modern history.
Mainland China had for a long time since 1945 played it carefully because the USA did not even recognise its legitimacy until the 1970s...instead siding with the Nationalists in Taiwan who were much more compliant to and aligned with western imperialist imperatives.
Before 1945 they had already endured the 100 years of humiliation that followed the briutality of the Opium Wars and the subjugation of China to western imperialism- - read up on the Opium Wars if you want to understand modern China!
Post WW2 the seat on the UN security council was expected by the European imperialists and the USA to be occupied by compliant Chinese Nationalists, not the CCP...but following Hiroshima and the evacuation of Japanese forces who had occupied and enslaved much of China since the early 1930s the Communists under Mao swept the nation and took power with the Nationalists fleeing to Taiwan which the Chinese Treasury gold.
Read some history to understand the past, present and the likely future...its a fascinating pursuit!
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Read some history - perhaps starting with the Opium Wars.
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