Nothing will collapse democracies and fuel accelerationist movements from the left or right like the collapse of what has historically been the linchpin of global democracy. “See, they couldn’t make democracy work, we should just elect the autocrat our side agrees with!”.
The movement away from the US Dollar as the global reserve currency can do much of the anti-imperialist work you’re suggesting without collapsing a country with 300 million people and potentially collapsing the global economy with it. That’s a transition that can happen gradually and gracefully. The Euro or Bitcoin is probably best suited to be this replacement. Nobody trusts the Yuan, not even the BRICS nations, and there’s really no real contenders after that. The problem with the Euro is that BRICS nations don’t want to use it. Countries with a history of being colonized by Europeans aren’t going to be to excited about it either. Many African nations are still under a form of currency imperialism via France. All their leaders who try to get out from under it somehow… end up without a beating heart.
You may laugh at Bitcoin as a suggestion, but it has had a stable fiscal policy and faithfully relayed transactions for 15 years, 24/7, no bank holidays, not a single hour of downtime, not a single hack. It has a market cap of 850 billion, that’s larger than Swedens GDP and places it in the top 25 countries by GDP. It doesn’t require rolling out a state-run treasury or stable banking infrastructure, just wireless internet.
And it’s politically neutral when it comes to countries. No country can control it, so they all can trust it. And it does this for < 1% of global energy usage and 100-1000x lower fees than credit cards or bank wires. You can send transactions in under a second for pennies in fees with Bitcoin lightning. There’s a reason small countries with little to lose are suddenly banking on Bitcoin, they don’t want to lose autonomy by relying on the US dollar. Ecuador and Argentina are controversial, but one can see the sense in their strategy. Argentina especially with how many times they have been fucked over by government-run banks and unstable currency. Bitcoin offers a way out of the debt-restructuring trap so many other small countries have fallen into with the world bank, IMF, etc.
that is a terrible idea. Even ignoring the energy use and that market cap is a bad metric for value, especially in a market with as much wash trading and painting the tape and just plain fraud as the bitcoin ecosystem.
The code base is under the control of around 5-10 people, the mining is under the control of 2-5 mining pools, with the largest two being the result of the largest pool splitting because it was too big and that’s not good optics, the majority of those pols and mining is in China. It has not reliably relayed transactions, being severely congested for weeks on end several times in its history. It does not have a “stable fiscal policy”, it has no fiscal policy. It is limited to 7-10 transactions/second (and no, lightning does not solve this, as you still need a regular transaction to settle, onboarding something the size of the EU would take on the order of 50 years until everyone has their channel, and then another 50 years if everyone were to settle their channels, along with many others fundamental problems with lightning), completely laughable if you want to use it as the backbone of the international financial system.
You want there to be a proper fiscal policy with knobs that can be turned, so you can deal with crisis/extraordinary events. For instance having your country’s currency tied to the dollar is horrible for managing that country’s economics and only done if there is no other alternative, using bitcoin as the global reserve would be that, just on crack and there’s no reason to do it unless you’re incredibly desperate, in which case the dollar is still a safer bet. You’d hand over control of your financial system to a shadow group of unelected people, so you lose even more autonomy. You want there to be checks and things like sanctions, to prevent fraud, theft and, in the case of sanctions, to have a political tool that is harsh but less so than an actual war. These things are features, not bugs. You can debate whether it’s good that the US is in control of a lot of these tools, but proposing to get rid of these tools altogether (which moving to bitcoin would do) would be even worse. There is no country that has gotten itself out of debt using bitcoin, so saying it is a solution is disingenuous at best.
These are just the same old bitcoin talking points that make it sound like it could actually work but do not hold up to the tiniest amount of scrutiny. And the end goal is always to just make the price go up so the gambling pays off, not any use case or making the world better or anything.
If the global reserve currency changing has tremendous risks of collapse to the US.
Most commodities are traded in US-dollars. This gives the US economy tremendous stability, as the stability get intertwined with the global economy as well as allowing the US to influence global ressource prices through increasing or decreasing the currency amount.
If these aspects stop working when a different currency replaces the US-dollar, it will expose the US economies weakenesses and force it to stand on its own much more.
We also saw the US to fiercly enforce the dollar as global oil currency. When Gaddafi suggested to the Arab league to establish their own currency and trade oil exclusively in that, he fell out of favor with the US again. Iran wanting to trade oil in other currencies is a strong sting to the US.
I generally agree with your post, though “historically been the linchpin of global democracy” boggles my mind and almost had me throw your text on the same pile with other posts like rElEvAnT uSeRnAmE. I wonder how you can uphold an opinion as easily disproven than that. How many leaders does a nation have to coup before you a forced to accept the fact that said nation has zero interest in democracy? Genuinely flabbergasting.
Nothing will collapse democracies and fuel accelerationist movements from the left or right like the collapse of what has historically been the linchpin of global democracy. “See, they couldn’t make democracy work, we should just elect the autocrat our side agrees with!”.
The movement away from the US Dollar as the global reserve currency can do much of the anti-imperialist work you’re suggesting without collapsing a country with 300 million people and potentially collapsing the global economy with it. That’s a transition that can happen gradually and gracefully. The Euro or Bitcoin is probably best suited to be this replacement. Nobody trusts the Yuan, not even the BRICS nations, and there’s really no real contenders after that. The problem with the Euro is that BRICS nations don’t want to use it. Countries with a history of being colonized by Europeans aren’t going to be to excited about it either. Many African nations are still under a form of currency imperialism via France. All their leaders who try to get out from under it somehow… end up without a beating heart.
You may laugh at Bitcoin as a suggestion, but it has had a stable fiscal policy and faithfully relayed transactions for 15 years, 24/7, no bank holidays, not a single hour of downtime, not a single hack. It has a market cap of 850 billion, that’s larger than Swedens GDP and places it in the top 25 countries by GDP. It doesn’t require rolling out a state-run treasury or stable banking infrastructure, just wireless internet.
And it’s politically neutral when it comes to countries. No country can control it, so they all can trust it. And it does this for < 1% of global energy usage and 100-1000x lower fees than credit cards or bank wires. You can send transactions in under a second for pennies in fees with Bitcoin lightning. There’s a reason small countries with little to lose are suddenly banking on Bitcoin, they don’t want to lose autonomy by relying on the US dollar. Ecuador and Argentina are controversial, but one can see the sense in their strategy. Argentina especially with how many times they have been fucked over by government-run banks and unstable currency. Bitcoin offers a way out of the debt-restructuring trap so many other small countries have fallen into with the world bank, IMF, etc.
that is a terrible idea. Even ignoring the energy use and that market cap is a bad metric for value, especially in a market with as much wash trading and painting the tape and just plain fraud as the bitcoin ecosystem.
The code base is under the control of around 5-10 people, the mining is under the control of 2-5 mining pools, with the largest two being the result of the largest pool splitting because it was too big and that’s not good optics, the majority of those pols and mining is in China. It has not reliably relayed transactions, being severely congested for weeks on end several times in its history. It does not have a “stable fiscal policy”, it has no fiscal policy. It is limited to 7-10 transactions/second (and no, lightning does not solve this, as you still need a regular transaction to settle, onboarding something the size of the EU would take on the order of 50 years until everyone has their channel, and then another 50 years if everyone were to settle their channels, along with many others fundamental problems with lightning), completely laughable if you want to use it as the backbone of the international financial system.
You want there to be a proper fiscal policy with knobs that can be turned, so you can deal with crisis/extraordinary events. For instance having your country’s currency tied to the dollar is horrible for managing that country’s economics and only done if there is no other alternative, using bitcoin as the global reserve would be that, just on crack and there’s no reason to do it unless you’re incredibly desperate, in which case the dollar is still a safer bet. You’d hand over control of your financial system to a shadow group of unelected people, so you lose even more autonomy. You want there to be checks and things like sanctions, to prevent fraud, theft and, in the case of sanctions, to have a political tool that is harsh but less so than an actual war. These things are features, not bugs. You can debate whether it’s good that the US is in control of a lot of these tools, but proposing to get rid of these tools altogether (which moving to bitcoin would do) would be even worse. There is no country that has gotten itself out of debt using bitcoin, so saying it is a solution is disingenuous at best.
These are just the same old bitcoin talking points that make it sound like it could actually work but do not hold up to the tiniest amount of scrutiny. And the end goal is always to just make the price go up so the gambling pays off, not any use case or making the world better or anything.
If the global reserve currency changing has tremendous risks of collapse to the US.
Most commodities are traded in US-dollars. This gives the US economy tremendous stability, as the stability get intertwined with the global economy as well as allowing the US to influence global ressource prices through increasing or decreasing the currency amount.
If these aspects stop working when a different currency replaces the US-dollar, it will expose the US economies weakenesses and force it to stand on its own much more.
We also saw the US to fiercly enforce the dollar as global oil currency. When Gaddafi suggested to the Arab league to establish their own currency and trade oil exclusively in that, he fell out of favor with the US again. Iran wanting to trade oil in other currencies is a strong sting to the US.
I generally agree with your post, though “historically been the linchpin of global democracy” boggles my mind and almost had me throw your text on the same pile with other posts like rElEvAnT uSeRnAmE. I wonder how you can uphold an opinion as easily disproven than that. How many leaders does a nation have to coup before you a forced to accept the fact that said nation has zero interest in democracy? Genuinely flabbergasting.