i agree that war is crime. I think it will always be considered.
However, if Bitcoin is spread out among the populace, they will most likely make the choice to trade rather than pool their resources for war in order to steal. by collecting bitcoin, a country/person is reserving the right to muster resources for war.
I was thinking of this in terms of "Do I want countries to have a Strategic National Reserve."
For me, the answer is the same as, do I want universities or churches to have an endowment.
In terms of the country having a National Reserve, it gives the country more runway to exert power globally or even just pay its bloated employee base in peacetime.
I would want small countries and jurisdictions everywhere to get reserves however they can in order to leverage more power in the face of the largest countries doing the same thing.
It would be better if the national reserves are full in the hands of private citizens. However, what if the private citizens are not smart enough to get their reserves, and it takes a centralized government to front-run other centralized governments, then that is better than letting the largest countries in the world front-run its own citizens and other nations.
It doesn't matter if it's the legacy power structures within each country that are collecting this bitcoin, or a new elite that is collecting this bitcoin that may replace legacy power structures.
So I would want each nation to front-run other nations, even though that means they are front-running their own citizens. This might run the risk of creating mafias within each country depending on the state of each nation. But it's better to create many small mafias than can balance the bigger mafias.
The bad aspects of mafia stuff could be avoided if the bitcoin adopters/front-runners also have some sort of moral awakening.
Something I just realized from Jason Lowery's Soft War is that Bitcoin possession returns us to that period of war when it was hand-to-hand combat, soldiers staring down the musket at their enemy 100 yards away. The human compassion starts to come back into play.
To quote Jason Lowery's SoftWar:
"Soldiers must be trained in how to overcome their natural disinclination to cause lethal injury. Hundreds of years ago, when soldiers still used close-ranged rifles where they could see their opponent's faces, it was not uncommon for them to refuse to fire, even under the threat of death. As one famous example, 87% of the rifles recovered from dead soldiers after Gettysburg (the third-bloodiest battle in American history) were fully loaded (3.12.1)."
To hold bitcoin, you need to be physically strong, able to resist physical aggression (single sig wrench attack) and have trusted friends and family (multi-sig fellow warriors) to help hold back the aggressors.
Whereas war became increasingly non-human, no compassion, nuclear warheads and drone attacks, bitcoin brings it back down to hand-to-hand combat. You need those 100 push-ups a day to hold strong.
I guess that is until amoral AI drones come and steal bitcoin from you.
AIs are expensive to power and lethal drones are expensive to make and when deployed expensive to apologise for
i would wager that the first time that micro ethno-kill drones are deployed the ones who deployed them will be arrested and tried at the hague
So, i think this whole conversation helped me to understand why self-custody is so important. Giving it to someone else custody it is basically turning oneself into a vassal/drone for whatever war that entity wants to wage. It's essentially a Microstrategy War Bond or a ArkB war bond (or more like a Brian Armstrong War Bond).
keeping it in one's own control brings the battle to oneself. I get to choose what I fight for. It's the ultimate dream of anyone who lived through watching Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the rest.
ultimately, it's not money if it's not in the hands
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