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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 13h \ on: The Risk of Reality Distortion Fields BooksAndArticles
Musk showed China how to build EVs- now they don't need him anymore.
The biggest distortion field today is US exceptionalism and its deluded belief that USA will always be the dominant political, economic and military power in the world.
Already Putin is ignoring Trumps pleas to end the war in Ukraine and China is calling Trumps tariffs bluff by limiting rare earths exports that US military manufacturers need.
The era of global US hegemony is swiftly receding.
The US is only doomed at the federal level. That's not the end of Western-style capitalism, and in my opinion could be a healthy correction for it in the long run. The PRC would still have to contend with a coalition of US-influenced regions, corporations, individuals. And I think you're way overestimating the value of rare earths compared to Bitcoin, a race where the Americas have a significant head start. The PRC seems like it would do well in a statist WWII-era militarized brawl, but if we do progress towards hyperbitcoinization, a lot of the interests and tactics you're describing would become irrelevant.
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The most successful eras of 'western style capitalism' actually looked a lot more like the model now being applied by China than what you see in the west today.
Today the west has been captured by bankers and rentseeking corporate cronies who now direct our governments.
The British Empire rose by combining the governments military and diplomatic power projection with the ingenuity and cunning of the private sector in a powerful collaboration of wealth creation.
This is how the Chinese are now operating.
The wealth of nations is always built via a combination of state led strategy and private sector innovation.
Today it is the US military who are mired in outdated military thinking and equipment and the axis of China and its tributaries who are innovating, developing and increasingly applying asymmetric technologies and tactics.
Rare earths are essential to so many of the high tech and military products of modern technology especially military equipment that without assured and reliable access to them the west is completely fucked.
China knows this and so does Trump.
Trump is now begging China to resume shipments to US military sector manufacturers and China is still saying fuck you- we will only supply orders where it is clearly proven the end destination/application is not military.
WW3 is already well underway and its not mostly on a direct military conflict level but much more at the mercantile supply chain control level- and that is where China enjoys a significant advantage. China has won the trade war and is now progressing toward capturing tertiary institutional and protocols control.
Rare earths are not the only strategic supply chain now absolutely dominated by China- China dominates price competitive manufacture of multiple strategic technologies including PV solar, robotics, nanotech, EVs, drones, batteries and much more.
The west has been blinded by its obsession with financialisation- the strategy which relies upon the wests legacy control over and hegemony in banking and finance.
That legacy hegemony is very swiftly lost if China builds alternative protocols and others who want to/need to trade with China adopt them.
And this is already happening.
Virtually every nation on earth now must trade with China or suffer considerable economic disadvantage.
The west forgot that trade is the basis of wealth creation and that financialisation is a layer above physical productivity that ultimately still relies upon physical products, supply chains and markets.
Bitcoin has been captured by this corrupt financialisation narrative in the west and is now almost exclusively seen as and used as a speculative commodity- not a MoE for the trade and payment for real goods and services.
As a speculative commodity Bitcoin is isolated from the real economy and poses no challenge and provides no alternative to the MoE hegemony upon which fiat money derives its strategic leverage and power.
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The west forgot that trade is the basis of wealth creation and that financialisation is a layer above physical productivity that ultimately still relies upon physical products, supply chains and markets. Bitcoin has been captured by this corrupt financialisation narrative in the west and is now almost exclusively seen as and used as a speculative commodity- not a MoE for the trade and payment for real goods and services. As a speculative commodity Bitcoin is isolated from the real economy and poses no challenge and provides no alternative to the MoE hegemony upon which fiat money derives its strategic leverage and power.
This reveals a few misunderstandings you have about Bitcoin. First, perception doesn't matter. The way anyone "sees" it doesn't matter. If 2 out of 10 individuals/corporations/countries make an effort to hoard as much Bitcoin as possible, while the rest reject it, the rejection by the majority doesn't negate the economic benefits that are accruing to the minority. It actually exacerbates the minority's advantage.
Yes, physical wealth creation is a crucial layer below BTC, but you need at least one abstract layer of financialization to organize and trade that wealth, and to coordinate incentives for exactly how much of each product and service to produce. You can see from Latin America that the amount of resources a country holds within its territory doesn't matter much compared to whether the government respects property rights. If it doesn't, it's going to become poorer until it collapses.
If the PRC really wanted to make China a global hegemon, they would follow El Salvador's example. That would set them up for a near-total monopoly on international trade for centuries. Like any country, the longer they wait, the more painful the inevitable transition.
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Bitcoin provides an individual with a superior form of money compared to fiat because Bitcoin treats all participants in the protocol equally.
But in the case of the nation state Bitcoin is less desirable because Bitcoin removes their privileged position of issuance. It is the ability of the state to debase fiat and to dictate the price of money via fiat that delivers the state with immense power. Combined with the monopoly over MoE fiat is a potent power projection tool for the nation state.
Hyperbitcoinisation would remove that power from any nation state that adopts Bitcoin.
Thus in the contest for military, territorial and power projection fiat delivers the state advantage compared to Bitcoin- precisely because fiat gives the nation state and its government significant privileges over the individual holder of the currency.
In times of peace and times of war fiat money is a potent lever for governments.
In the west since at least the 1970s neoliberal governments have abused that lever- allowing the issuance of fiat debt for use to pump up speculative non productive asset prices- that is outright misuse of fiat monetary leverage but has happened because western governments have been taken over by the bankers.
China in contrast has mostly used fiat leverage to build productive capacity and infrastructure.
That is why China has won the trade war already.
Bitcoin is better, from my point of view than holding fiat money in western nations where the fiat leverage is being so abused.
But China has much less indulged in that corrupt abuse- in China the CCP is highly motivate to deliver real economic advancement or they would likely be removed by force. And they have delivered.
Western governments are just fronts for the wealthy bankers and capital who now direct them in a corrupt and diseased process of crony capitalism that is leading to the decline of western hegemony.
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