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| This week's cyberattack on Colonial Mutual demanded ransom payment in Bitcoin |
I've never quite got Bitcoin and I doubt J does, so we don't have any investment in it. Are we the silly ones for missing out, or the wise ones for not buying today’s tulips?
The other day I took notice when Charlie Munger said Bitcoin is a "threat to our civilisation". Charley is one half of Charlie and Warren, as in Warren Buffet, my long-time hero, guiding hands of the behemoth Berkshire Hathaway and so I paid attention.
Then just a few days ago, Elon Musk stopped Tesla taking Bitcoin as payment, mainly because of its environmental damage -- apparently it takes a huge amount of electricity to create, which I did not know.
So, here is, courtesy Bari Weiss and her Substack, giving Michael Green space to argue the anti-Bitcoin argument. Peter Thiel, by they way, was the co-founder of PayPal with Musk, another fascinating story.
I found this piece by Green interesting and powerful. Very much worth a read. [Here is the Wayback link]
Points 2 and 3 struck a chord with me. The US is rightly excoriated for its international misadventures, many illegal, many of which have killed thousands. Thinking Vietnam, South America, Iraq, Afghanistan. But, as Green says "imagine the counterfactual" (his emphasis). Without America, the world would be poorer. And Russia, Iran and China are not replacements we should want. /Snip:
2. I am not an apologist for American hegemony and all the behaviors it has enabled. But imagine the counterfactual. Over the course of the 20th century, the relative standard of living of those who lived under the protective umbrella of Pax Americana exploded relative to those living under the competing Soviet or Chinese systems. While techno-optimists will suggest that the counterfactual is utopian, the evidence on the ground is far darker. I would encourage a read of the work of Radigan Carter, a pseudonymous (and disenchanted) U.S. special forces operative who has written eloquently on the subject, and has argued that a world without U.S. leadership is a world even he would be afraid of. (Radigan is uncertain about crypto and holds a small allocation.)
3. China, Iran and Russia are playing the dominant role in the world of cryptocurrency. In the last week of April, mining pools based in China accounted for roughly 90% of the processing power (“hash rate”) in the Bitcoin network. Roughly three weeks ago, a power outage in the Xinjiang region of China resulted in a plunge in global Bitcoin processing. Bitcoin mining — the process of record keeping for the “immutable” chain of record on which the Bitcoin network depends — is dominated by entities in countries with the stated objective to harm the interests of the United States. Bitcoin proponents continuously assure us that this is “just about to change,” but the data has not shifted in a meaningful manner in the last five years. This is not a decentralized system. It is centralized in the countries that seek our destruction. [Read on...]
