I'm not defending the position, I'm explaining it.
And it's not the defense that's the issue, it's the money spent on the defense that they're comparing. They're saying that while crypto may cost $X to support, it's less than $Y where $Y is the total expenditure of the US Army.
The proponents are making a fallacy that's a little hard to explain, basically mixing up a measurement/indicator with a cause. This comes up in a lot of places, because it can be difficult to tell when the fallacy is happening and when it's not.
For example, Linux has fewer desktop viruses written to target it than Windows, which is a big part of why it can be a good security decision to use Linux. And genuinely, regardless of the reason, Linux desktop environments do tend to have fewer viruses targettng them.
However, the reason why Linux has fewer desktop viruses is because it's not the OS that most ordinary people use, so it would be incorrect for people to say, "Linux should be the dominant OS for everyone because it has fewer viruses." Because if it was the dominant desktop OS that everyone used, it would have more viruses. Primarily targeting Windows is an effect of malware authors wanting to target as many people as possible. But Windows is not the cause of them writing viruses, they are not writing viruses because they want to target Windows, they want to target people and they use Windows to do so.
And in the same way, in theory yeah, you could look at something like Bitcoin and say that it's not being used in the same ways that the USD to fund certain actions/industries. But to argue that Bitcoin is a better currency because it doesn't get used to fund military spending... The military uses the USD to accomplish its goals. The USD is not itself the goal.
Like you said:
> The value of a national currency is a reflection of the rest of the world's confidence in that nation to meet its obligations.
The US would still want to signal and defend that confidence in a world where it used Bitcoin. So really when we talk about the cost and energy use of Bitcoin, we're assuming that in a world where Bitcoin was the dominant US currency those energy costs would be in addition to all of the existing military spending and energy usage. Because when say that the US military is defending a signal of stability/confidence, it's not the signal itself that the US is defending, it's defending what the signal says.
> 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.
And it's not the defense that's the issue, it's the money spent on the defense that they're comparing. They're saying that while crypto may cost $X to support, it's less than $Y where $Y is the total expenditure of the US Army.