* > [Money] is a weapon of war.*

This point is so true and so important it deserves special emphasis. If you imagine two societies at war, one with currency and other without, who wins? Clearly, the one with currency, because you can collaborate far better than the other, and war is won primarily by scale, which money can maintain.

And as for those that want to abolish currency, or nation-states, this is naive idealism: anyone who demolishes their nation-state will just get invaded and absorbed into one of the remaining nation-states. Peace lovers would do better to plot a course for peaceful subsuming of states into a larger entity, something like the EU model.

> Clearly, the one with currency, because you can collaborate far better than the other, and war is won primarily by scale, which money can maintain.

this is a weird hypothetical. i can't imagine a nation-state without currency and i don't think you can either. so how is it clear who wins?

i highly doubt isolated regime can somehow improve it's sustainability simply by manipulating money. Venezuela just had a massive devaluation - did it make Venezuela richer? did it improve it's economy or GDP? no, it's still the same corrupt country on a brink of collapse.

Venzuela is a great example of my point! If V got into a war right now, let's say with Columbia, how would that go? If the money is worthless in V, then how do you pay troops; how do you pay for the food for the troops; how do you pay for the gas to get the troops where they need to be; how do you pay for the weapons? If you don't pay for that stuff, how do you get it? Will people volunteer? How long can they do that until they starve? Or will you use coercion? Coercion requires troops, and also suffers from the starvation end-game, at both ends.

Basically, V can't fight a war until they get their money situation in order.

> an instrument of empire

i don't see the word "nation" in here. do you?

i don't care about empires losing their weapons. i would very much invite such an event and would do everything in my power to enable it.

The problem is when your empire loses its weapons but all the others still have theirs. Think China's trade policy is unfair now? Imagine if we had no tools for monetary policy. There would be much laughter in Beijing.

Only multilateral disarmament works for game theoretic reasons. I don't think soft disarmament in areas like aggressive monetary policy can be done until hard disarmament happens, so I write that stuff off until we've had at least 50 years with no major war anywhere on Earth. (Most smaller wars are proxy wars between major powers.)

Like most major innovations Bitcoin is ahead of its time. Maybe on Mars...

i totally understand your argument and agree that it is valid.

the difference here is that cryptocurrencies undermine isolated regimes even more than they do developed economies. being able to own something a government can't debase or manipulate is extremely useful for everybody.