Why Morally Decent People Can't Buy Bitcoin
Those who care about the Jewish people shouldn't "invest" in cryptocurrency, a tool of terrorists
This post is the sixth in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the first five installments here:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth
The JFK Conspiracy Theory Which Makes the Most Sense & Why It Matters Today
An Open Letter to Elon Musk Thanking Him for the Correct Decision Shutting Down Neo-Nazi Kanye West
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
As the shocking levels of fraud committed by former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried and his cryptocurrency platform FTX have unfolded in the media over the past few weeks, I’ve resisted commenting, as the whole story is just too irritating on so many levels. There have just been many other stories of seemingly greater importance to focus on, and other writers to cover the scandal who are more deeply educated in the cryptocurrency technologies which have emerged over the last decade.
And besides, this “SBF” guy just seems like a douchebag, a term that, as a feminist, I don’t like applying as an insult, but one which, since moving to California in 2010, I’ve found increasingly appropriate for tech-obsessed man-boys like him. (I honestly didn’t really understand the necessity of the term until my return to California. But that’s a rant for another time.)
These crypto hustlers are just massively obnoxious to me as a Zionist new media activist. I’ve largely lived online since 2009, spending my days editing news websites, writing fire-breathing blog posts, doing investigative journalism of American Islamist organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, and studying the anti-Israel and antisemitic content infesting Wikipedia. People who choose to spend their time trading real money for imaginary money, with the hope it will someday be worth massive amounts of real money, are just a different breed of online troublemaker than I am. We may swim in the same sea, but we’re as different as a shark and a bottom feeder.
So, being “Extremely Online,” as the saying goes, I’ve had plenty of time to watch the Bitcoin and crypto story unfold. I’ve very consciously chosen to stay the hell away from it. Apart from the overwhelming douchebaggery of its primary participants and evangelists, that’s ultimately for three practical reasons: economic, environmental, and Zionist. I’ll break down all three, and I hope you will then join me in boycotting this pseudo-industry:
Economically, this whole space is really just another fuckin’ pyramid scheme.
Over the last few years I’ve been inundated with random strangers trying to get me to buy Bitcoin from them. Unknown people will text or email or tweet me, trying to lure me into their cryptocurrency exchanges. Sometimes they’ll invest a lot of time in trying to befriend me. There’s a reason for it: in order for people who hold Bitcoin to make any money from it, they have to constantly dupe new people to invest in it. The pyramid goes like this: new people buying Bitcoin are at the bottom, and then there are the people selling and trading Bitcoin. Above them are the people who own the exchanges and technologies used to do the trading, and then on top of them are the people actually inventing the cryptocurrencies themselves, who own huge quantities of it. Simple. Anyone who understands the basics of how a pyramid scheme works in the non-digital world can see how it operates here.
In a pyramid scheme business, one does not make money through selling the good or service. One makes money through duping other people to sell the supposed good or service. Meanwhile, whatever the thing being offered is, it’s actually a fairly worthless or scammy product. Herbalife is a well-known example:
Here’s a nice, quick explainer of the concept in general:
Cryptocurrency functions in exactly this same way, as plenty of people with way more business knowledge than me have pointed out:
Environmentally, the amount of electricity wasted on Bitcoin “mining” and exchanges is just horrifying.
I’ve grown fairly reasonably libertarian on environmental issues over the years, but I’m still not leaving on lights or letting the water run. Wasting power and resources is still stupid. And that’s what Bitcoin does: the amount of power it takes is so high that I’d just feel guilty participating in it:
According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden.
PBS reports:
In May of 2022, the world’s sum total of Bitcoin mining operations had an annual energy budget nearly equal to the entire country of Argentina, or the Czech Republic, or, according to Cambridge University’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, all the tea kettles in England boiling water for 26 years.
….
Due to its high demand for electricity, proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining has not been welcomed in every corner of the world. Miners seek cheap energy to maximize their profits, but their energy-intensive activities typically drive electricity costs up for everyone. Even when mining plants run on renewable energy, critics say, they often exploit existing clean energy resources at the expense of ordinary consumers, who are then forced to buy more expensive, and often dirtier, power.
This is obscene. A fucking pyramid scheme that uses as much electricity as whole countries!
Most importantly, as a Zionist, I cannot support a platform and a technology which empowers the Islamist theocracy of Iran to fund its genocidal terrorism against the Jewish state.
What exactly is the practical purpose of cryptocurrencies? How are they intended to be useful? When they first began to emerge over a decade ago, their principle differentiator from fiat currency was clear: you could use it to buy illegal stuff, and law enforcement wouldn’t be able to track you. This was a currency whose specific purpose was to be unregulated by any government, able to transcend geographic boundaries obscuring the identities of those trading it.
This was money for those who wanted to commit crimes. Soon the “Ransomware” phenomenon emerged of hackers breaking into corporations’ systems and demanding Bitcoin to unlock them.
So it should come as no surprise that soon terrorists and terrorist states started utilizing Bitcoin, too. Three stories for your consideration:
First, from May of last year, “Iran Uses Crypto Mining to Lessen Impact of Sanctions, Study Finds”:
Around 4.5 percent of all bitcoin mining takes place in Iran, allowing the country to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies that can be used to buy imports and lessen the impact of sanctions, a new study has found.
At its current level of mining, Iran’s Bitcoin production would amount to revenues close to $1 billion a year, according to figures from blockchain analytics firm Elliptic.
…
The electricity being used by miners in Iran would require the equivalent of around 10 million barrels of crude oil each year to generate, around 4 percent of total Iranian oil exports in 2020, according to the study.
“The Iranian state is therefore effectively selling its energy reserves on the global markets, using the Bitcoin mining process to bypass trade embargoes,” the study read.
Second, from September this year, “US Charges Three Iranians for Ransomware Attacks on Women’s Shelter, Businesses”:
Three Iranians have been charged with trying to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from organizations in the United States, Europe, Iran and Israel, including a domestic violence shelter, by hacking in to their computer systems, US officials said on Wednesday.
Other targets included local US governments, regional utilities in Mississippi and Indiana, accounting firms and a state lawyers’ association, according to charges filed by the US Justice Department.
While the criminal charges do not say whether the alleged hackers worked for the Iranian government, a separate US Treasury Department statement said they were affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an Iranian intelligence and security force.
…
According to the charges, the three men infiltrated the computer systems of a wide range of businesses and governments between October 2020 and August 2022, encrypted their data and demanded Bitcoin payments of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Some victims, including the domestic violence shelter, opted to pay the ransom to recover their data.
Such ransomware attacks have skyrocketed over the past decade, damaging scores of US companies and other organizations around the globe.
Third, from November, “Crypto Exchange Binance Helped Iranian Firms Trade $8 Billion Despite Sanctions”:
Crypto giant Binance processed Iranian transactions with a value of $8 billion since 2018 despite US sanctions intended to cut Iran off from the global financial system, blockchain data show.
Almost all the funds, some $7.8 billion, flowed between Binance and Iran’s largest crypto exchange, Nobitex, according to a review of data from leading US blockchain researcher Chainalysis. Nobitex offers guidance on its website on how to skirt sanctions.
Given these facts about Bitcoin’s pyramid scheme structure, catastrophic environmental costs, and usage funding terrorism at billions of dollars a year, how on earth is any participation in this morally justifiable?