Hugh Naylor
@hughnaylor
Word dump on Bitcoin & empire: 1/4 Seems we are at an unusual confluence of events in world history in which the empire doesn’t oppose (and in fact encourages) challengers to its globally dominant financial assets — namely, gold and Bitcoin. At any other time in the empire’s history, such challengers would have been opposed/suppressed. In fact, for decades America outright suppressed gold. And if Bitcoin had been created earlier in the empire’s lifecycle, the goverment likely would have tried much harder to quash it. But Trump and team (notably Bessent) have outright encouraged both gold and Bitcoin. Neither asset, for example, was subject to tariffs (and they certainly could have been). But with the empire exhausted, the emphasis now is to weaken the dollar (that is, make it one of a number of reserve currencies, but no longer the reserve currency) and outright deprioritize US debt/treasuries as a global-reserve asset — all to bring the trade deficit down and somehow stimulate domestic industry.
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Hugh Naylor
@hughnaylor
2/4 Not suppressing gold and Bitcoin suggests that this is all part of a broader, deliberate attempt to manage an unwind of the empire into something else, likely trying to steer it as non-violently as possible from hyperpower to great power (good luck with the non-violently part, but just sayin). In this bizarre confluence of rapid geopolitical and technological change — all happening at a time when the indebted empire must reorganize and in turn impose inflationary policies/monetary-debasement (ie money printing to pay off huge national debt means the cash in your bank will buy you less stuff over time) — you have a situation that is ripe for a challenger to gold to arise and thrive (cough … cough … Bitcoin). I certainly think smart-contract networks such as ETH and SOL will thrive, too, probably more so than Bitcoin over the coming decades.
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Hugh Naylor
@hughnaylor
3/4 But for now the focus here is on Bitcoin, which in a sense is an unproductive asset that nevertheless is increasingly seen as a decentralized hedge against monetary debasement (which is what gold is, albeit as an inferior form of Bitcoin because of a variety of technological features). And in such a moment in history of monetary debasement/high inflation imposed by the declining empire, a few assets that are unproductive and rigid in supply have that bizarrely undefinable, yet highly attractive, monetary premium to them — that is, you know they are valuable because they are perceived by others to be valuable (but otherwise it’s a shiny rock, digital or otherwise.
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