Bitcoiners believe the crisis in Afghanistan could have been avoided with Bitcoin

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Residents of Kabul seek to escape at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Image: NurPhoto / Contributor via Getty Images

The Taliban took control of the Afghan capital Kabul yesterday as the United States’ 20-year war suddenly ended. In sheer panic, the Afghans ran to the banks for cash, only to find them evacuated with their money locked up.

Many questioned the safety of those on the ground, wondered what would happen in the days and weeks to come when the Taliban returned to power, and watched in horror as people rushed to the airport in an attempt to leave the country. Along with these concerns, Bitcoin maximalists also wondered aloud how the cryptocurrency could solve the country’s problems or could have prevented war in the first place.

None of this, from the US military intervention in the first place to yesterday’s bank panic, would have happened if it had not been for Bitcoin, say some of Bitcoin’s most ardent supporters. “This should show you how important #Bitcoin is to the world. Control your own money!” A cryptocurrency newsletter tweeted.

“A sad signature of the situation in Afghanistan are the images of people (from all walks of life) trying to withdraw money from banks and failing,” another popular account tweeted. “Let’s put an end to such inhumane situations through healthy p2p electronic money where people can * always * be in charge of their own money. “

Dr Josh Cotton, a Bitcoin advocate and founder of the former MilitaryToken, said in a tweet that “a huge amount of money has just fallen into the hands of the Taliban because the money cannot be really secure “, adding of course,” Bitcoin fixes this. “

For some, however, the situation in Afghanistan is not simply an opportunity for crude promotion, but a validation of some deeply held beliefs.

Jimmy Song, one of Bitcoin’s most ardent public advocates, said Bitcoin would have prevented the war in Afghanistan if it had been the world’s reserve currency instead of the greenback.

“No sane government would have spent explicitly taxed dollars on a war that has cost so dearly and has lasted so long,” he told Motherboard. “The only reason the United States could was the dollar’s privileged position as a global reserve currency that allowed stealth taxation of the entire world through inflation.”

The idea of ​​inflation as stealth taxation, and its link to the financing of war, is commonly shared by Bitcoin maxis with a libertarian streak.

It goes back to an old idea called debasement, notoriously practiced in the 16th century by the King of England Henry VIII to help finance wars with France and Scotland. The king replaced the precious metal content of coins like gold with cheaper metals like copper, reducing the costs of producing foreign exchange at the expense of taxpayers. The Roman Emperor Nero used to employ a similar trickery, reducing the silver content of the coin. By some estimates, debasement led to annual inflation of around 1,000 percent at some point in Roman history.

The US government is doing something similar today, proponents of the dollar debasing theory say. The government prints more money than it can save with underlying assets so that it can finance foreign wars, which comes at the expense of citizens in the form of taxes.

“Bitcoin doesn’t let governments make this crazy deficit spending because they are forced to get loans into the market to do it,” Song said.

Erik Voorhees, one of the early public advocates of Bitcoin and CEO of self-guarding crypto platform ShapeShift, told Motherboard that while the situation in Afghanistan is complex, “it’s basically a symptom of a military empire that has grown too far “.

“We shouldn’t pretend that Bitcoin will solve the immediate suffering there, but it absolutely helps solve the empire problem, starving the empire of tax revenue and reducing its ability to print money for funding. wars, ”Voorhees said.

“A Bitcoin world is a world of small governments, and small governments do not invade and occupy foreign nations for 20 years,” he added.

“The biggest [concern] is violence and destruction there, ”Song said. But even in a war-torn, poverty-stricken country, Bitcoin can still help, he thinks: “If you’re your own bank, you don’t have to worry about a bank run,” he said. Song said.

Being your own bank, or the idea of ​​self-preservation, has been central to Bitcoin’s near-mythical origin story since the 2008 global financial crisis. The mysterious founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, said that Bitcoin would allow peer-to-peer electronic transactions without requiring users to trust an authority, such as banks. It is also this idea that is at the origin of skepticism today among some Bitcoiners of centralized exchanges who keep custody of your coins. “Not your keys, not your coins” is an oft-heard mantra.

The hardships Afghans face today are very real. Afghan filmmaker Sahraa Karimi, the first woman to be appointed director general of the Afghan National Film Organization, released a heartbreaking video call yesterday. “The Taliban surrounded Kabul, I was [sic] to the bank to get the money, they closed and evacuated, ”she said. “I still can’t believe this happened.”

Bitcoin is probably the last thing a lot of people in Afghanistan are thinking about right now, and using a historic crisis to promote cryptocurrency in a deaf way like some have done is sure to upset many. It’s also worth mentioning that in the world of Bitcoin it has become sort of a meme to suggest that the Taliban could eventually embrace Bitcoin (this was also said from ISIS, but it never really materialized) .

“Everything the Afghan government does with Bitcoin won’t matter as much as what people do there,” Song said.

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