Evil, Evil Bitcoin, Notgeld

Mining rigs at a Bitcoin farm in Russia - Andrey Rudakov

Hyper-Bitcoinization is Now Baked-In by Mark E. Jeftovic talks about how Bitcoin might become the world's reserve currency.

Along the way I learn about Notgeld:

In the past I viewed Bitcoin as an evolving global “Notgeld”, a German term for “emergency money” that emerged during the Weimer Hyperinflation. As I’d written previously, every hyperinflationary event has its notgeld, whether it’s prepaid phone and gas cards in Zimbabwe, cities printing their own scrip, Venezuelans wrapping gold flakes in worthless Trillion Bolivar banknotes, there’s no end to the ingenuity (and desperation) employed.

My theory was that in an oncoming era where all global currencies were going to hyperinflate simultaneously, Bitcoin would emerge as the global notgeld. And then, I thought, afterwards some kind of global monetary reset would occur. That would probably be some kind of SDR against a basket of hard assets, including gold, but I never imagined that Bitcoin would be a component of that basket.

Note: SDR - Special Drawing Rights - is an international reserve asset, created by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) in 1969 to supplement its member countries' official reserves. [Hey! 1969, that's the year I graduated from high school.

Anyway, he stirred up my anti-Bitcoin attitude, so I had to comment, and since it's such a glorious comment, I am sharing it here so you may bask in its gloriousness..

I don't like Bitcoin. It might be a good reserve currency. What I don't like is the amount of energy and resources being devoted to its development. Zillions of dollars and zillions of kilowatts are being used to competitively compute a checksum that could be done by an original IBM PC. I intend to spend some time (one of these days) figuring out just exactly people are getting paid for mining. And we won't talk about how many terabytes the block chain has now got to and how much digital storage is being consumed worldwide just to hold the umpteen zillions 'distributed' copies. I haven't invested the time because it is basically a thankless task, kind of like ancient archeology. It might alleviate your curiosity but is unlikely to provide any material benefit, other than to confirm my already deeply held suspicions.