In 1914, to print the money they needed for war, the British, French and German governments all took their countries off the gold standard. What followed was one of the most deadly wars in history. 40 million people lost their lives, another 20 to 100 million died from the Spanish flu that followed, believed to have originated in the trenches. The environmental damage from the war, the pollution, the waste, the destruction are verging on unquantifiable.
One consequence of the First World War was the Second. That war took 75 million lives, with greater and more wide-reaching environmental destruction.
Nothing like the same level of destruction would have been possible with the discipline imposed by gold. Neither France, Britain or Germany had the gold to pay for the war to go on for the extent that it did. The war really would have been over by Christmas, because the gold would have run out. Fiat money made WWI possible.
Fiat money is a force for war. In 1971 the US took itself off the gold standard to print the money to pay for another one - Vietnam. No other human activity causes as much environmental destruction as war. Nothing even comes close. As weaponry evolves its capability, so do the environmental consequences - a nuclear bomb causes considerably more damage than a sword.
2003 gave us the biggest global peace protest ever seen. Bush and Blair ignored the 36 million protestors and went to war in Iraq anyway, under false pretences as it turned out. How much more environmental damage?
I have focused on its wars, there is also the mammoth environmental damage caused by government waste and the unintended consequences of its misguided spending. The environmental disaster is not bitcoin, it is big government. How do we limit what government is capable of?
Protesting does not work. Voting changes nothing.
There’s an old saying amongst bicoiners: Bitcoin fixes this.
Peter Thiel famously noted in 2008 that politics is not the way to achieve political change. “The mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country”. Bitcoin is that escape. In that same year, as governments turned to the digital printing presses to bail out a broken system, bitcoin was first announced - a decentralised, transparent, open-source, apolitical, voluntary, borderless system of money for the borderless medium that is the internet. Governments can’t print or debase it. It is your mode of escape from fiat.
The more people that use bitcoin to store their wealth and to trade, the more the government monopoly of money is eroded. Either bitcoin will eventually replace fiat or the competition it provides will enforce greater standards on fiat, thereby limiting government capacity to cause environmental harm.
Let us embrace bitcoin for the environmental disaster it has the capacity to avert.