Advancing Technology Disincentivizes War Regardless of how quickly Bitcoin Defunds it
Some points on specific technological trends in energy and other areas to gain better situational awareness of where we are on the war-disincentivation curve.
Fiat funds war to a rather unnatural degree
It is obvious that easy fiat money helps facilitate psychopathic financial terrorists ability to effect ongoing mass casualty events through war, including violently enslaving entire populations to fight wars that a populous may have no interest in. Without the ability to issue new monetary units on command, war bears a real cost upon whoever goes out and wages war, such that the entity waging war has skin-in-the-game, which as Nassim Taleb has pointed out, is not actually so much about the incentives imposed, but the removal from gene pool effect upon those who take the wrong (on average) risks. However, this state of affairs that will emerge on the bitcoin standard, where one must raise money somehow, or directly confiscate it (which is rather challenging and ineffective to do with bitcoin en masse across a wide geography), does not automatically guarantee that there will be zero war or other large scale conflicts.
First, let us consider the overarching meta-principles at play. A common refrain that some bitcoiners like to utter is that “bitcoin does not change human nature” which is easily demonstrable to be an incredibly foolish thing to say — this style of bitcoiner, who often may live in a leftist city and may still remain engaged in a nonsense fiat profession (e.g. fake money management / investment, scalping/intermediating real estate transactions, etc), is under the impression that nature constancy somehow implies things generally staying the same, but let us consider a basic human interaction: Bob slowly walks up to another man, Charles, with a smile on his face and his hand extended, to which Charles reciprocates, and shakes Bob’s hand. Contrast this with Bob rushing angrily toward Charles, and sucker punching him in the face, to which Charles may respond by punching back, or utilizing a firearm should he deem it necessary to defend his life, depending on the location where this takes place. It is of course obvious to then conclude: “the nature of humans is to punch other humans.” As painstakingly obvious is this may seem, dear reader, do not blame me for having to write it out so pedantically, but blame your fellow men for perhaps failing to grasp the basic notion of something known as a function, a thing that has a range of outputs, that is entirely variable on the inputs.
The functions themselves may be generated by other functions, as it is human nature to adapt. Moreover, this is not a 1-directional, linear chain of events, but there are feedback loops, as life is a highly complex system, with many dimensions — it is a non-linear dynamical system, of unfathomable unpredictability and quantities of entropy — consider for a second that a mere 12 words from a list of 2048 is sufficient that all of human civilization for the end of time will be able to generate public-private keypairs for generating bitcoin addresses and there will NEVER be a single collision event. Then consider how much more complex the sum total of all events and actions that might transpire on Earth are, recalling that even a few simple molecules with interacting components where multiple things cannot be computationally modeled directly, and simplifications are made such as using density functional theory to make the model tractable within the world’s most powerful supercomputers. All of that to say, you need to have a basic capacity for groking directionality of what a changing input will do, and since you cannot always model it perfectly, you need to be able to just know things even if they are being intuited in a way that is too complex to verbally legibilize.
The effect of sound money (i.e. bitcoin) on the directionality and volume of large scale conflict is not one of those overly complex things, it is rather simple, and if you haven’t already figured that out, I don’t have time to explain it to you. Also, if you do not yet understand hyperbitcoinization will occur, I am not explaining that either, as you simply have a psychological (not intellectual) defect and you can go fuck yourself.
Technology, broadly speaking, also defunds war
Rather than debating the exact extent to which bitcoin defunds war, or how soon that will come about (the timeline for hyperbitcoinization is unknowable, and the speed of stabilization into sound human action via the draining of foolishness that could take additional decades is also unknowable), we can consider, is there anything on the horizon that could have an effect to reduce conflict that plausibly may have an impact on a noteworthy level, whether pre or post hyperbitcoinization (or both)?
The answer that will be explained herein is that technology is one such thing, and as in previous posts, understanding this will require revisting what technology means at a deep, fundamental level, for just like the word money, it is a term that gets tossed around and overlooked, usually with an improper understanding of its actual nature. In Bitcoin is the energy minimal system for a planetary civilization… I wrote about what technology is fundamentally, which are those methods by which the aggregate, averaged subjective value of a good or service produced compared to its raw energy input is maximized. Therein I explained how Jevons paradox is the foundational mechanism of all growth, whereby an increase in value to energy ratio leads to growth in consumption to a degree that increases the total consumption of the underlying energy. Intuitive examples for this are found in the transportation, where it is more clear how energy fits into the overall value chains — for instance, as new technologies for travel were developed that allowed much higher speeds, they were actually able to lower the fuel required per passenger mile, hence the ability to have a lower cost of flying than driving.
If you have machines and knowledge that allow you to take a chunk of energy, and use it in a way that transforms the value many times over that raw chunk of energy, then that machinery or knowledge is what matters, not the underlying land. With Taiwan, it is proving challenging to relocate all the knowledge and machinery around semiconductor fabrication, but it is being attempted and gradually shifting. There is nothing in the land of Taiwan itself that is needed to enable semiconductor fabrication. If on the other hand, you have a culture that has a limited ability to absorb technology advances, whether by being a global Schelling point or by stealing IP (which is not a real thing anyway, so there is actually no such thing as stealing IP), then you might feel as you have little left to turn to other than your natural resources, which seems to be the case with Russia, the 11th most energy intensive nation in the world (energy consumption per GDP). Of course, more energy is better, but energy has an energy cost, and there is a natural saturation point where adding growth via raw energy is going to have relatively diminishing returns. It is a question of time preference: will you build the machine that is hard to build, but generates more value, or the one that is energy intensive and cheap? As mentioned before, it is actually the former that leads to the most total energy consumption, you eventually make your energy too expensive if you try to just throw more energy at the problem — no amount of hay will turn a horse into a car, or a car into a plane.
This is also why comparisons that show China overtaking US in various metrics are rather misleading — they fail to consider that China took over the low-tech manufacturing after much of the juice there was squeezed. The nature of technology is commoditization over several decades so taking over a bunch of commodities, while a great step toward industrializing and building base wealth, is not exactly impressive in an absolute sense. In a heat engine, there is much greater efficiency when the enthalpy (heat) exists at a higher temperature even if there is the same amount of total heat available. Commoditized businesses, simple manufacturing processes, mining, etc, is low temperature, and the only way to get something HOT, as they say, is to come up with something new — China is basically just a giant waste heat recovery engine if you think about it. But like Russia, they are operating worryingly close to the base energy level, without demonstrating a capacity to innovate, and a broken culture known for dishonesty derived from their higher levels of communism than the West most likely.
The world in general runs a bit close to the energy level and the raw material level, both of which are extremely geographically controlled — even nuclear energy, which ought to be location agnostic, is heavily constrained due to violent “regulators” (organized criminals) that are able to rather effectively track nuclear material and thereby prevent the global proliferation of an engineering-first energy source.
The new engineering first energy source:
Geothermal energy is a bit like nuclear energy, it is a very cheap source of heat, and it actually also is derived from nuclear decay within the Earth, so you might even call it geonuclear. A 46x increase in global base energy, which is the amount that makes Earth hit a Kardashev type 1 civilization (a rather silly and arbitrary metric), would take such a miniscule fraction of percent of heat from the crust, it would go practically un-noticed.
The challenge is that geothermal heat resources are not all that hot, turbines are based on steam (not great), and the fact that drilling is expensive. This has kept geothermal to a limited set of markets where there is high probability of finding a shallow hydrothermal reservoir, and like hydro, the best spots near volcanoes have already been taken. Roughly half the cost is in the drilling and the other half in the turbogen powerplant, which is universally based on steam, which has been optimized over an entire century.
The world is now on the cusp of a new class of turbine that runs on supercritical CO2, which is known to have a number of benefits: greater cycle efficiency at low or high temps; you don’t consume huge amounts of water (another one of those things driving geographical war); the CO2 is actually way denser than steam as you can compress it to the density of a liquid without it condensing (key feature of supercritical), allowing your turbine to be much, much smaller, so the cost can come down severalfold, especially given emerging metal additive manufacturing… and certain “other things” I won’t go into. These are going to be pretty great in a broad number of applications — you’ll eventually be running CO2 cycles on your fossil fuel plants, concentrated solar power if that ever makes sense, and all your nuclear reactors. After CO2 turbines being proven in geothermal, they may go to small modular reactors, which could replace the deisel generators you were using to drill your geothermal wells, so that side of the equation will get cheaper too.
Plus, multiple rather well-funded startups are greatly advancing drilling for geothermal across a range of technologies, including applying techniques learned from fracking, plasma that vaporizes rock, and something that is sort of like a microwave laser that vaporizes rock (though technically not exactly a MASER, mm-wave with gyrotron). Vaporizing rock is nice because as you get deep enough, it becomes far too expensive since you constantly burn through your drill bits, and then have to pull your entire drill bit all the way out, which wastes a lot of time. So it will be possibly to drill cheaply, and just go directly into hot rock anywhere, fully enclose, and run CO2 through your system to get a much cheaper turbine.
There are a bunch of different challenges I won’t go into, but it should be clear that these are all engineering challenges rather than a “how do we ensure terrorists won’t bomb our gas pipeline” sort of challenge. So if you can get all those things resolved, and banks know they are resolved, you turn the money printer on for that, and completely turn it off for unreliable wind & solar that has been fucking over the developing world. Both solar & wind are exremely wasteful and detrimental to the environment with their huge waste of materials, plus they are a humanitarian atrocity, falling short of all out genocide, but well within the camp of a Malthusian anthropocidal inclination. CO2 geothermal literally puts CO2 in the ground, and the eco-narratives around that have been entrenched for decades, so regardless of whether they are true, it is basically impossible to stop geothermal sCO2 if it hits a crossover point on energy cost, which seems rather likely. Wealth will be largely decoupled from land so invasion will bear a negative expected-value. Yeah, maybe there are some retarded terrorists who will still go to war idealogically, but they will end up killing themelves out and they are largely parts of proxy wars, so they will become less signficant if the major powers calm down.
If that happens, war immediately becomes highly unprofitable. The most profitable thing to do becomes over-saturating on energy and leveling up. Bitcoiners could be the leaders behind this, which then smooths the global transition and allows the restoration of the West, with it being made abundantly clear that bitcoin and energy is the underlying source for all that is good. The West will go for it, because it is the best way to combat China’s Belt & Road style ambitions with what we have always been better it — the hard engineering problems and innovation.
Interestingly, this is also a way of gaging bitcoiners and bitcoin adoption, which is still very very close to 0%. I vacillate between cautious optimism and cynicism, but this is neat, because setting up complex testing rigs is not something that can happen whenever you’d like, but I happen to have stumbled across one. I tested the fiat world be helping make the strongest aerospace parts in the world and transforming US hypersonics capabilities, which helped me learn ventura capitalists (and fiat at large) are retarded, I found out they were retarded again by solving COVID, and I found out the bitcoiners are retarded when I solved the adoption problem via Jevons other work (Money and the Mechanism of Exchange), which clearly showed “composite legal tender” and the 4 functions of money model provide the answer. Here we have my final test. Good luck!
-written, at least 2nd half, while stuck in Houston waiting for the bitcoin meetup as my 2 of 3 connecting flight was delayed several hours so staying, and I’m not re-reading this shit or editing it for any of you — go find some influencer thinkbois if you want some polished, feel-good articles. Might write a follow-up later about how I think the trends in military hardware will shift fairly monotonically toward the defender’s advantage