Not a crypto person at all but I do remember when the last US president ripped up the Iran deal which afforded the International Atomic Energy Agency the right to inspect their operations and replaced it with... nothing. I think this is proof enough that all of the talk about Iran being a threat (to the US? to the world?) is vastly over hyped.
Now we’ve got warhawks, oil companies & the finance industry all working together with Iran as the bogeyman driving all their policies. Watch for Yellen or congress to drop some “bitcoin supports Iran” talking points any minute now.
But yes, I agree with most of what you said, also what Jellen said about global corp tax is kind of messed up. They don't want to go after their own big corps, but rather control the rest of the world. As long as the fiscal years start at different times, they can still shuffle money around as they please, but nobody actually dares touching the US corps in the US.
Of course it is, otherwise it wouldn't be a government. People get really silly with this. Governments can define laws, enforce them and so on. They have many rules that apply to them and not to everyone else. That's the whole point.
You cannot imprison other people, but your government sure can. There are many cases where the government has special jurisdiction as compared to citizens and it is clearly recognized as a moral thing to have in democracies around the world.
Sanctions seem like the least harmful way to deal with bad actors at the nation state level like Iran, North Korea, and Russia. This is the equivalent of not playing with the kid who can't play fair or follow the rules. Replace playing with trading.
You might say Iran is not a bad actor, but that's not a winnable position to take.
Would you prefer military intervention over sanctions? What else can you do in these kinds of situations?
It's still very fucked up that the US signed a treaty with Iran saying "we'll lift sanctions if you do X", Iran did X... and the first thing the US did after the next administration change was to say "Fuck the treaty we signed, we're putting sanctions back".
What's the message being sent to Iran? "It doesn't matter if you try to play nice, we're going to destroy your economy unless you submit as a vassal state to the US"?
Also, I don't see how the US has any sort of moral legitimacy to unilaterally decide which country is a "good actor" and which country is a "bad actor", even against the wishes of its allies (including western democraties). In a fair process the US would only be one of several countries deciding together, and would only act with common backing.
If your answer is "moral legitimacy doesn't matter, because the US has the power to enforce its decisions", sure, that's true. Enjoy it while it lasts.
But don't act surprised when other countries start banding against US hegemony.
More like the equivalent of the school bully threatening to beat up any kid who plays with the kid he doesn't like.
They're not an American client state, bit they're no worse than America, China, or Saudi Arabia
You can argue that they're a threat to american interests and an embarrassment to the American intelligence agencies, but that's not exactly the same as being a bad actor.
https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-...
[0] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/irans-islamist-proxies
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-iraq-proxies-insight...
You: economic sanctions are immoral!
Lol.
So, how do you feel about throwing gay people off buildings?
Edit: Yes, I know this isn't any part of why we have sanctions against Iran. But it should be.
I come from Venezuela, I have family in Cuba. I know what economic sanctions look like and what they do against dictatorships. Hint: they do nothing, because they're not going to abide by your rules or meet you in the middle.
The US doesn't embargo Iran because of that. Otherwise they'd probably have to embargo a bunch of their closest allies for half a century or more.
It's all realpolitik, morals don't influence this issue much.
Besides, it was ISIS throwing gay people off roofs and filming for propaganda. Iran has an authoritarian system with it's (many many) own sins, but it's no different than any other country in the Middle East. All are terrible, but some receive love from the west and some don't.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia
An international body has at least some checks and balances to keep it close to the truth.
At a consumption rate of ~1% of the potential exportable amount, this doesn't seem like a particularly significant evasion of sanctions.
The Iranian people impoverished by sanctions would beg to differ (no pun intended).
Nixon created it when he decided to leave the gold standard after France demanded physical gold as payments.
Iran and other countries under US sanctions use alternatives including barter. Bitcoin can just be one of those tools. But bitcoin mining is more a function of cheap electricity and high bitcoin prices. Electricity is cheap in Iran. 4.5 percent of bitcoin mining is negligible given the context of the sanctions. One would expect it to be at say 20 percent as their is an American embargo on the country.
This just seems to be more of a click bait article for self promotion or company promotion.
This aspect was not clear to me until I read The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous, the first two thirds of which is more of a history of money than pro-Bitcoin propaganda. There he argues that moving off the gold standard was a bad idea in many ways apparently unrelated to money.
And of course there's this famous website: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/. For reference, 1971 was when Nixon decoupled the US dollar from gold.
See Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein (of NPR's Planet Money):
* https://bookshop.org/books/money-the-true-story-of-a-made-up...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Goldstein
From what I've read on the topic, gold (and 'hard money' in general) is generally not a good in most circumstances. Yes, if your mint/central bank takes orders from the government to create more money it can lead to bad things, but generally that disaster only needs to happen once before everyone realizes how bad an idea it is and probably never does it again.
Recommend the book. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is also worth checking out:
Here’s a quote that summarizes the effect of the time period nicely:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
— John Ehrlichman, to Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine in 1994, about President Richard Nixon's war on drugs, declared in 1971.
That’s what the fuck happened in 1971. Then, notice how many graphs actually show an inflection point around 1981 when Reagan started as president, employing Nixon’s Southern Strategy to get elected and then serving those voters with policies that attacked the lower and middle classes (slashing spending on federal aid programs, raising income taxes while lowering capital gains taxes, freezing the minimum wage, raising military spending which is essentially a cash transfer to rich arms dealers, etc). Then throw the Cold War in there, and you have a US government that is in an adversarial position with everyone but the 1%.
ps: I say this as a non-American.
One of the more interesting quote's I've encountered along the way, "The foreign tax rates of U.S. oil multinationals fell significantly after the first Gulf War, during which the United States intervened to protect Kuwait, a major oil producer. Although it is not possible to know for sure what caused this decline, a possible interpretation of the fall in taxes collected by oil-producing countries is that they reflect a return on military protection granted by the United States to oil-producing States."
Figure 2 on page 20 has the discontinuity.
This article explains the link between Saudi Arabia and the US. It explains a lot about the relationship that exists despite so much chaos and turmoil. As they say, money talks and bullshit walks.
Interesting. It seems like they're basically saying that mined blocks should be accepted based on the location of the one submitting it. This whole article seems to be a sales pitch. Lets see how decentralized and unregulated Bitcoin really is.
>This level of Bitcoin mining would currently bring in annualised revenues of close to $1 billion.
I wondered how they came up with that number. Miners currently seem to earn around $30 million per day[0]. 30*365*0.045 = ~500 mil. Seems like they conveniently used the highest recent rewards of $60mil per day. The statement just seems sensationalist at best, all things considered.
That's silly. Mining doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, so setting up a tunnel to mask the origin of the block would be trivial. The moment Iran's blocked, why wouldn't miners do that?
This implies forking the blockchain. So some clients will use "curated" blockchain. I don't think that this fork will be popular.
They're not talking about censoring/forking/manipulating the chain. They're talking about centralized financial services built on top of bitcoin blocking coin that is linked to Iran.
- legitimate miners should be willing to spend $1 mining to gain $1+delta
- launderers should be willing to spend $1 (dirty) mining to get $1-delta (laundered)
So launderers should outcompete legitimate miners.
“Ulterior motives” includes a lot of things. It definitely includes money laundering (see Iran and China) but it also includes people who mine so they can conduct 51% and MEV attacks on the network. On the positive side it may include pseudo-altruistic types such as major currency holders, who are willing to mine at a loss in order to support the currency’s value. The thing all of these parties have in common is that none of them are incentivized to mine honestly solely because of the intrinsic profits involved in mining: your hope is that their ulterior motive is compatible with honest behavior. When that isn’t born out, your network runs into trouble.
* Obviously in the real world there are tons of capital expenses and prices fluctuate wildly, so this model is loaded with inefficiency that can allow some folks to make money on mining as a business in and of itself. But PoS systems will have fewer such inefficiencies.
[Edit: Actually matthewdgreen is right in a sibling comment, that the argument can be made without considering laws as such]
or laundry mat…
or car wash…
or…
The petrodollar system is why the USD was able to retain status as the international reserve currency even after Bretton Woods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar_recycling
Why should the US be able to do that?
The US cares about the Syrian deaths about as much as they do about those in Yemen. Morals play absolutely no role here. And when a politician howls something about humanitarian reasons you can be sure it’s a farce.
What matters is giving head to the right person. Do that, and anything is fair game.
Also, the supreme leader is at the top of Iran's power structure and is not elected by the iranian population.
I don't know the history super well but I would speculate that either Iran wanted to sell oil in another currency, or the other oil exporting countries we got in bed with (OPEC) didn't like Iran, or another one of our allies (Israel) didn't like Iran.
Whatever your feelings about US/Iran or your feelings about Bitcoin/Climate Change, sanctions have been an effective peace-time tool for the UN to bring countries to the negotiating table. Perfectly effective? No. Security Council politically motivated? Yes.
Better than war for the citizens of all countries? Yes.
Will Bitcoin lead to more war as a result of weakening the power of sanctions? I wouldn't hazard a guess. But I didn't see this possibility coming.
If one values international law, or the, "international order" (as Secretary of State Blinken put it, without irony), then a bright line needs be drawn between, "international sanction tools" that are used by the UN and the unilateral sanctions issued by the US.
>Will Bitcoin lead to more war as a result of weakening the power of sanctions?
Bellicose nations have always issued demands to other sovereign nations backed by the threat of illegal wars of aggression. Will the ability of targeted nations to avoid being starved to death via the use of bitcoin lead to more war? Possibly, but is the problem there really bitcoin, or rogue nations who consider themselves above international law?
Yes, exactly. They (in part) defeat an act of unilateral violence, one that is very cheap for the perpetrator, from one country against another. Which seems a very good thing.
From a practical perspective Bitcoin is effectively a virtual, self declared nation state but the only thing that exists within that nation is Bitcoin itself. Thus military expenses in the form of Bitcoin mining only cover a small subset of protection offered by conventional military.
Because of this, most Bitcoin proponents are extremely narrow minded, they think the currency equates the entire nation, therefore the USD is equivalent to the entire US and only protecting the USD is equivalent to protecting the entire nation.
Every day people run into the same problem with rent control. They believe there are no real resource constraints represented by the price, therefore they believe changing the price alone is enough to solve the problem. Yet they never realize that prices are just information used to allocate scarce real resources. If information is manipulated and no longer reflects reality then it has become a lie and therefore serves nobody except the one who told the lie.
Okay now that we have established that currencies are information that reflect the allocation of real resources, then what real resources does Bitcoin allocate? It allocates a share of real resources around the world based on the people who bought and sold it. The irony is that these real resources are being protected by their respective governments, thus the existence of the US military (and all other militaries) is an essential part of Bitcoin's current valuation.
Sadly this is true, but not for long. Bitcoin adoption is still very small but it will grow. Once it grows to cover the vast majority of merchants in the world, the next flip of a switch will be in people's minds: they will start valueing things in bitcoin (or bits, or satoshis), instead of USD, EUR, etc. (In pretty much the same way people switched from drachmas to euros recently...)
And once that happens, people will stop thinking of the fiat monetary value of one bitcoin (or bit, or satoshi), and then your statement will not be true anymore.
That's really no different than bitcoin. With USD a ton of energy is used to protect what backs it, which is physical resources. With BTC a ton of energy is used to protect what backs it, which is the chain.
Military also protects against external threats (like other countries). Mining also protects against external threats (like bad actors).
Historically prior to the 1900s pretty much everywhere was on a gold or silver standard of some sort.
The US has national interests economic and strategic that exist independently of the reserve status of the US dollar. The sprawling US military infrastructure does not exist to preserve the status of the dollar, it exists to protect these interests. The US doesn't operate bases in Germany and Japan for the dollar. Or do you really believe that should Bitcoin replace the dollar as the international reserve asset, these military bases around the world would be closed down?
The importance of the petrodollar is vastly overstated and the reserve status of the dollar has far more to do with the liberal attitude the US takes to foreign capital flows and the size and depth of US economy and consequently its capital markets. Mercantilist economies such as Japan and China would be unwilling to accept foreign capital flows appreciating their currencies and making their exports more expensive largely because of the domestic political issues this would cause.
4% of the post-sanction exports. It seems that the sanctions "evasion" does not have an impact on the efficacy of the sanction.
Instead of seeing Iranian mining boom as some tech-enabled sanction workaround, I see it as just that -- a boom just because electricity is cheap.
It's been a good ride.
So...if I open a mosque and mine Ethereum instead of Bitcoin, can I still get some of that free electricity?
the subtext here is obvious: dear normal people, Uncle Sam will not tolerate a competitor to the USD. get out before we criminalize crypto.
