> But to argue that Bitcoin is a better currency because it doesn't get used to fund military spending
I don't see anyone arguing that. The contrived argument I made was that USD requires a military to be stable. Bitcoin only requires proof of work. It's not a straight forward argument and I don't think it's quite a genuine argument because the US would have a military regardless (I think?) but it does stand to reason that without the US military the USD would not be the reserve currency of the world and therefore would not be nearly as stable.
Do keep in mind the context I proposed the argument was not intended to be a genuine argument, but rather an example of someone making a more all-or-nothing, bad-faith argument.
> The contrived argument I made was that USD requires a military to be stable. Bitcoin only requires proof of work.
I'm not sure I agree.
Proof of work requires a functioning Internet, functioning supply lanes for GPUs, low-ish latency, general consumer confidence in the chain, proportional miners to Bitcoin's value so that it's actually secure, etc... Not to mention that Bitcoin itself requires a lot more than proof of work to function as a usable currency.
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Further, this is kind of begging the question a bit. Saying that the USD requires massive military presence to sustain is not the same as saying that Bitcoin requires massive energy to sustain, for all of the reasons people have talked about.
The fact that the USD military would still be around if the USD went away is the reason why the argument that military energy usage should be counted in Bitcoin's favor is a flawed argument. But if cryptocurrencies went away, we wouldn't need proof of work at all. That energy cost would legitimately vanish. And I just want to kind of jump back to that point, because if feels like there's kind of a weird slight-of-hand happening here.
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The flow of logic we're following is:
- It's good that Bitcoin proponents otherwise play defense, otherwise we'd start talking about military costs of the USD
- Military costs of the USD are not dependent on the USD and likely wouldn't disappear if the USD went away
- Nevertheless this was just an example of a flawed argument, not a real argument
- ???
- Therefore, the arguments against crypto are similarly flawed.
But that doesn't follow. The fact that you can come up with a flawed argument for trying to use military costs as an argument for crypto, and the fact that we all kind of agree that it's a flawed argument, does not automatically imply that therefore all criticism of crypto is similarly flawed.
I don't see anyone arguing that. The contrived argument I made was that USD requires a military to be stable. Bitcoin only requires proof of work. It's not a straight forward argument and I don't think it's quite a genuine argument because the US would have a military regardless (I think?) but it does stand to reason that without the US military the USD would not be the reserve currency of the world and therefore would not be nearly as stable.
Do keep in mind the context I proposed the argument was not intended to be a genuine argument, but rather an example of someone making a more all-or-nothing, bad-faith argument.