Bitcoin Forum

If bitcoin goes mainstream, wouldnt the military begin being funded by bitcoin, or would the militaries around the world disapeer?

Most likely if bitcoin became THAT pervasive it would mean that fiat money was dead. if fiat money was a thing of the past than governments would have no way to hide the cost of war through money printing. If politicians had no way to hide the cost of war through money printing they would have to get on stage and say "look we need to go to war with dirkadirkastan and so we will be sending every man woman and child a bill for 50,000 dollars to pay for it" Even the most ardent neo-cons may find themselves wearing hemp wrist bands and making peace signs under those conditions.

so that was the long way of saying no the military will never accept payment in bitcoin.

Why do you think militaries would begin to disappear with the advent of bitcoin?

neither

This is the best answer of all time!! Not because it explains anything...

my previous post answers this question

there are three ways to fund a military.

1. crowd sourcing
2. taxes
3. spoils of war

you don't need bitcoin or usd to pay for a war. you could use gold or diamonds or oil or any other physical commodity. you could pay for it by bartering services as well.

This would have a DRASTIC impact on how the US military operates. It would surely get very lean. and super badass somehow.

It was military spending which killed the gold standard. World War I broke sterling as the world reserve currency. It was the Vietnam War which forced Nixon to close the gold window and take the US completely off the gold standard too. Both countries have been debt-addicted ever since to finance excessive government expenditures including military adventures.

In a Bitcoin-only economy with fiat gone, the military will have to live within the tax-base available to support it. However, this may simply mean a diversion of resources to robot technologies, which are far cheaper per unit firepower than projecting human soldiers thousands of miles away.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/29/killer-robots-ban-un-warning

ok, allow me to clear the air from an intelligence point of view.

1) the government decides legal tender.
2) they can impose taxes on bitcoin to fund themselves
3) if the government decided to use crpto currency, the military would know five years in advance and be packaged into smaller units.
4) they would start hoarding coins way before announcing that they are the new tender.
5) who are you guys kidding? if they chose to accept bitcoin they would design ASICs.  they'd have working prototypes by the end of the day that are hundreds of times better, they would produce a farm on the scale of acres and mine the shit out of it, by the next re-target a tera-hash would look like today's kilohash.

Just my two satoshis.

And note, if the military pointed their current computing power to bitcoin for a single day, it is unlikely anyone else would get a coin, let alone the entire US gov. Then factor in the top 50 governments and military. By the time China and Japan join in, BTC will just bring us right back where we started, the rich getting richer and the poor getting nothing.

They wouldn't have to change much.

At the moment the us invades states if they don't accept USD for oil (f.e iraq) and soon they might invade if they don't accept USD for bitcoin. No real change there.

Militaries are not funded through currency they are funded by theft enabled by the government's monopoly on the use of force. Whether they steal your U.S. Dollars, your Bitcoins, or even steal your body through conscription (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription) makes no difference.

Anon136 said it all. Military as everyone else would be happy to accept bitcoins. But they will not raise enough for current expenditures. Building tons of very expensive equipment to be regularly destroyed is profitable to those who build and operate that stuff. And they are getting paid via inflation, in other words, stealing from everyone's present and future income. If Bitcoin survives and outlives fiat, there will be no inflation and no easy way to confiscate such enormous amounts of money.

some purple voluntarily sign up for military service. so they are not entirely funded by theft.

Bitcoin going "mainstream" implies the undermining of the US Government's control over systems that it draws power from. This obviously includes the financial systems we have in place today. This includes the IMF, World Bank, and other international operations like private investment banking cartels (Central Banking systems, Goldman Sachs, etc...). You can't have Bitcoin going "mainstream" and the US Government retaining it's position as an international authority through its influences in military and banking at the same time. They are mutually exclusive. The only way this would not be the case, is if Bitcoin was somehow co-opted and bastardized in order to serve the interests of centralized power structures. Changing the blocksize to be more than 1 MB is a simple example of how this could be accomplished. Here's a little explanation of that:

http://keepbitcoinfree.org

I hope the US military, Mara Salvatrucha, Cosa Nostra, Yakuza, and other gangs have difficulty funding themselves in a BItcoin world.

hahaha, US military can requisition every ASIc and gpu in the states. They can afford to Buy Amd with only a slight dent in thier budget, that's before Darpa and Nasa throw in their two cents. Keep in mind sha256 and sha512 were made by nasa.

hahaha, by next month darpa could be mass producing Asics that fit in your palm but put out 10 tera hashes

asics only work for one coin. there would be too many coins for them to mine them all.

if i have enough money, i can develop any kind of ASIC i want.

So basically if the military wants to own bitcoin it can? which means it will if it has to

But once in they get supplied with uniforms, guns, MRE's etc. I guess the real question is when will arms manufacturers accept bitcoin? I know Russia/China etc would rather be paid in non-USD, a state-backed exchange in these countries would be VERY interesting.

you get the idea. but governments are sluggish, they take time to make decisions and implement. if they choose bitcoin, we can dump it and move to a more advanced one, or beta yet, we'll have physical 3d printed coins that are verifiable. If you want to avoid governments.... it's gonna be guerrilla warfare.

Donations :)

Do the government really need to do much more to keep us at bay. I mean check this out. http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin#q=nfl%2C%20bitpay%2C%20bitcoin%2C%20bernanke%2C%20federal%20reserve&cmpt=q

keep playing with the words; debt, loan, ecu, usd, dollar, gold, guns, water, revolution

There is a very interesting trend with bitcoin, debt.

as you well know bitcoin is in beta, it's not a finished product yet. If you want to see direct US action, let the market reach 10 or 100 billion us$ in volume, that will be an economy the size of three 3rd world countries. You'll see the gov use for a while, mostly for external transactions, until the people it doesn't like adopt the system and profit from it. At that point, they will kill it using any of the many options available to them.

imagine if iran bought restricted nuke tech using bitcoins.

Let them have their nukes, a balance of power is not the worst.. just look at the mining process of bitcoin. We are all sitting here contemplating how someone could pull an Iran nuke but with bitcoin.

Junk food imposes greater damage to people and the healthcare system, that cannot really be helped. Heart disease, cancer, car accidents, swimming pools are a bigger threat than iran.

a thousand custom ASICs could literary destroy the current gen of ASICs.

ya but it would be in no ones interest to do this. we would just hard fork into a new POW scheme.