Its Texas Aggies, dammit said:
Luke Gromen argues beginning at ~1:55 that the bitcoin strategic reserve is being driven by the national security apparatus to address negative consequences of the 50-year fiat experiment. He says these include political instability due to increasing wealth inequality and an inability to manufacture war materiel due to excessive offshoring of manufacturing capacity. Interesting.
I listened to about 15 minutes of it at the point you reference and couldn't take it anymore. He's got bits that sounds smart at surface level because his interviewer isn't smart enough to push back with the right questions. It's a deficit hawk and protectionist using similar language as the gold bugs but with a different asset saying "but this asset is better".
He seems to place blame of the perceived problems (and ignore any benefits) of globalization entirely on fiat currency. He doesn't understand how markets and supply/demand actually work in allocating scarcity in the global economy. Currency is just a unit of exchange.
We buy weapons supplies from other countries because it would consume more resources to do it domestically. We could do it here, we'd just be poorer if we did. Same with a number of other industries we've offshored. We can't "compete" with China largely because our labor and manufacturing capabilities are going to higher/better uses of those precious resources.
Income inequality has gotten larger because improved technology and a more global market allows the best products/services/people to reach more people.
I can't seem to fully understand his criticism of the bond market and how it's dictating our national defense. He praises price controls and rationing as a way to control inflation during WWII.
How is spending $15T on a Bitcoin reserve going to help solve all of this? His argument seems to be that the current system doesn't work so we need to "refinance" the current debt using bitcoin, reshore everything and implement austerity measures. So we'll all be poorer, but at least we got rid of the fiat currency.
I think BTC and more specifically blockchain is interesting, but after 15 years of hype about how it will transform payment methods and the benefits of web3, it has yet to actually find legitimate real world uses beyond drugs, arms dealers and pump-and-dump schemes.
