[nradov]

That wouldn't be a valid comparison. There's a lot more to the other financial system than just currency and payments. Even if hypothetically the whole world adopted Bitcoin we would still need most parts of the other financial system.

[derefr]

Sure, but rather than a vertical slice, do a horizontal slice. How much energy does every country in the world’s mints, bank vaults, etc. use up, including their whole logistical pipelines that wouldn’t be needed if countries didn’t mint+store physical currency?

[vmception]

what would be a valid comparison?

my conclusion so far is that a lot of things use as much power as entire countries, but this unit of measure is a higher standard created specifically for bitcoin, and I'm waiting to see otherwise.

[lifeformed]

What about the costs of military and lives and environment of the efforts spent in maintaining the USD hegemony?

[simiones]

If you think the USA would stop asserting its hegemony if the world used Bitcoin instead of USD, I don't know what to tell you.

[lifeformed]

I don't mean to imply that switching to bitcoin will stop wars, but rather just remind that the true cost (and value) of USD isn't in it's infrastructure, but in the efforts taken to enforce it's dominance.

If we imagine the ideal future 100 years from now, with a more balanced world order and economic justice for all, then we have to experiment with radically different systems at some point in between. Not saying that bitcoin is the solution or even a good one, but I think it's important to experiment with new ideas, and not just technologies but systems like UBI too.

Of course, getting climate change under control is a much more pressing issue, so bitcoin is untenable, but I don't think it's as frivolous as a lot people make it out to be. It's a valuable experiment, and there's a lot to learn from its failure and success. My takeaway from the issue of its energy usage is that trying to save the climate by discouraging energy usage is kind of fruitless because society will always want more; focusing on replacing polluting energy sources with clean ones is the sustainable systemic solution.

[simiones]

> If we imagine the ideal future 100 years from now, with a more balanced world order and economic justice for all, then we have to experiment with radically different systems at some point in between.

Sure, but I think for any effect a bitcoin-like system has any chance to have on the US's ability to wage war, it will have the same effect on the US government's ability to fund massive social programs. That is, bitcoin is going in the opposite direction from what is needed for achieving the world we hope for.

> My takeaway from the issue of its energy usage is that trying to save the climate by discouraging energy usage is kind of fruitless because society will always want more; focusing on replacing polluting energy sources with clean ones is the sustainable systemic solution.

While I agree with you that this is how things are looking, and it is also the most important long-term goal, I personally don't believe that we have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate failure if we don't focus on drastically reducing consumption in the short term. To me bitcoin has proved exactly how chasing free economic growth will always drink up any electricity we can produce.

[vmception]

Basically they think that deflationary assets irreparably cripple the debt market, and therefore the government bonds market, and therefore wars will be harder to fund and less arbitrary.

There is some accuracy to that. Would raise the stakes and the resources involved in funding a war. The last 70-80 years of US hegemony have been based off of the market tolerance for US debt and slowly being paid their money back, in US dollartoken. And before then, US hegemony was not a thing.

So there is nothing to say that the market won't find a way to have fractional speculation on bitcoin/crypto asset backed securities, and there is nothing to say that a governing body won't find a way to sustain itself and gain compliance with its peers through it. But there is also not a history of US hegemony supporting it either. Not a panacea because the world was much more of a tinderbox before US debt based hegemony.

[NotPavlovsDog]

This really needs to be the top comment about alternative tokens and pollution.

US military has been estimated between the world's largest polluter and as much as 140 countries.

That Dollar, that "Freedom" isn't free, and it's the world paying the bill.

[Note: American here. Ashamed about our imperialist impact ]

https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter...

[TeMPOraL]

As long as the top reply to that comment explains that replacing dollar with a cryptocurrency would change absolutely nothing about the size and activities of the US military.