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Good points although what is usually omitted from all these 'crypto' originating narratives is that Iran prefers Yuan to Bitcoin as most of its imports are from China. Bitcoin is accepted for the toll only where the vessels owners choose it as an alternative to Yuan.
The Yuan is too volatile for international trade. If the PRC starts shit in the strait then the Three Gorges Dam is getting nuked immediately. That makes them risky as a trading partner.
And yet trade with China has been what has enabled Iran to remain viable and build a military capable of repelling and defeating the mighty USA and Israel.
https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1156720/Tehrans-toll-booth-system-is-now-controlling-Hormuz-traffic
'While not all ships are paying a direct toll at least two vessels have and the payment is settled in yuan.'
Iran China trade has demonstrated to others that China now provides a near full service alternative to the petrodollar hegemony of the USA.
See Russia!
See the Gulf States whose largest customer is China and who now see USA as an extremely unreliable security partner and most of whom are already members of BRICS and mBridge!!
China had already won the trade war with its rare earths dominance and now its increasingly seen as the biggest winner in the Iran-Israeli-US war.
US petrodollar hegemony is decimated.
'China “stood up to President Trump with the rare earths, and the U.S. backed down,” said Anja Manuel, a former State Department official working on Asia policy in the George W. Bush administration who now advises companies on geopolitics. “It is really mutual damage control now.”'
Wheres @Cje95 lately?
That doesn't explain why Trump had to reverse his entire trade war on China since Xi played the rare earths card.
New Zealand has extensive geothermal power generation - we developed it in the 1950s using government funded science and investment - it certainly is an area with more potential but also some problems and limitations.
Iceland has I believe pioneered a system for storing the GHG rich emissions from geothermal gases - they inject them into rock formations deep below the surface which absorb them.
Not that Trump even recognises the existential dangers of climate change...but developed responsibly geothermal could be a small contribution toward USA gaining ground on Chinas massive lead in power generation scale and costs.
China is yet to exploit their geothermal resources much - perhaps because they have such a huge lead on all other power generations technologies- for example building new nuclear plants at 1/6th the cost/kw and 20 times the scale USA is achieving.
There is no rare earths card. The PRC makes shit up to justify being a totalitarian slave state, as though a country with individual rights wouldn't be able to construct a power plant.
'When Pentagon officials last fall briefed President Trump on a draft of a bureaucratic defense strategy document, it framed China the same way it had for a decade: as the top security threat facing the U.S.
Trump balked and ordered his Pentagon deputy to rewrite it, according to three officials familiar with the exchange. When the administration’s revised National Defense Strategy published in January, it offered instead a conciliatory tone toward Beijing
“President Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China,” an unclassified version of the document declares.
While every administration crafts its own defense strategy, Trump’s second is making the unusual move of discarding a policy that was formulated by his first.
That bipartisan approach sanctioned by Trump 1.0 characterized China as the most consequential U.S. adversary.
The Trump 2.0 framework is instead a seismic shift in U.S. policy, trade practices and rhetoric toward Beijing driven by a new mantra: Don’t rock the boat.
Since Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the South Korean city of Busan in October, the administration has paused hefty tariffs planned on Beijing’s most prized industries; abandoned plans to penalize Chinese companies determined to be security risks to the U.S.; curbed investigations into Beijing-linked hackers; waved through Chinese investment in the U.S. with little scrutiny; and told officials to tone down their comments on China, current and former U.S. officials familiar with the changes said.
Pursuing activities antagonistic to the rival superpower has become further paralyzed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordering staff that they need his signoff for any China-related actions, people familiar with the matter said. As a result, even senior Commerce officials at times sit by his office waiting or outside the building, watching for his car. Officials at other agencies pursued a ban on a China-linked router maker by styling it as an order that doesn’t name the company or China.
Trump himself didn’t even directly namecheck the economic and military rival in his February State of the Union address.
The dramatic reversals, which have alarmed some of Trump’s own national security aides, are in part aimed at laying the groundwork for Trump’s May meeting with Xi, according to current and former U.S. officials. Many China hawks in the administration have taken to gallows humor, calling the shift the ‘Busan Freeze,’ named for the South Korea meeting between the leaders that produced a fragile trade detente.
Trump’s advisers had initially prepared for a second term full of tough actions on China, recalling a first-term president who had declared Beijing “antithetical to U.S. values and interests,” kicked some Chinese companies out of the U.S. and oversaw aggressive intelligence operations against the country. The second term did begin with tariffs on China that briefly reached nearly 150%...
Beijing invoked a nuclear option it hadn’t dared to in the first term: Last April it [shut down most exports of rare earths, mineral deposits essential for high-tech applications, threatening U.S. production of everything from electric vehicles to missiles, jet fighters, data centers and submarines. China mostly controls the refining, separation and global export of rare earths. Beijing’s willingness to sever such a critical trade tie caught Trump’s team off guard, according to administration officials.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and others appealed to Trump to walk back the tariffs and dial down the trade war, to get the minerals flowing again, according to officials familiar with the matter.
Against a president who prides himself on his dealmaking, China often appears to be prevailing.
China “stood up to President Trump with the rare earths, and the U.S. backed down,” said Anja Manuel, a former State Department official working on Asia policy in the George W. Bush administration who now advises companies on geopolitics. “It is really mutual damage control now.”
WSJ
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-china-xi-beijing-e247250d?
We do want peace. It's the PRC who wants to start a war over Taiwan.
And yet trade with China has been what has enabled Iran to remain viable and build a military capable of repelling and defeating the mighty USA and Israel.
Military capable??? Tens of millions of people almost died because the IRGC can't defend their airspace. When did we get repelled?? We chose to let them live because of a call from Pakistan. Where was the PRC this whole time? They did nothing to intervene except moan about international law.
BeiDou
PRC has provided Iran with a trade partner throughout the failed US sanctions of the last fe decades.
Now others see the option as viable.
USA as a security partner is seen as a failure.
I don't think you're grasping the stakes here. The US could wipe out over half of Iran's population if it wanted.
TACO!
Cudda, shudda, wudda - but didn't...
Because that would only hasten the complete collapse of US hegemony.
A gentle if disgraceful decline is more appropriate even from Chinas perspective.
Thank you thank you thank you Donald fucked up bigtime Trump.
Xi is waiting for you at the meeting you delayed with a big smile and raised requirements for continued access to rare earths. Loser.
By the way calling someone a chicken after they agree to not kill someone, while you're claiming to be on the side of peace, is absolutely insane.
Coulda shoulda woulda - but didn't! Because that would only hasten the complete collapse of US hegemony.
You said they enabled Iran to build a military capable of repelling the US, not that the US would stand down for humanitarian reasons. We're not going to make the same concessions for the PRC that we're making for Iran, so you can't just ignore the military capabilities and claim we can't do something because the optics would be bad.
The $7.3 billion annual figure buried in here deserves more attention. At current prices, that is roughly 87,000 BTC per year Iran would accumulate just from strait tolls -- putting them on pace to rival the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve acquisition rate. And they would be acquiring it through actual commerce, not market buys.
The other detail worth flagging: 1,100 crypto nodes running through a nationwide blackout means dedicated infrastructure, probably military-grade power. Iran is not just using bitcoin as a financial tool. They are running infrastructure that makes them a stakeholder in the network security itself.