What If - Satoshi Nakamoto had orange-pilled the United Nations first!?
What follows is a fictional story in the style of a Marvel Cinematic Universe tale from an alternate timeline.
The ultimate technology for the United Nations
Bitcoin could have been the ultimate in foreign-policy technology, to help cement the world peace desperately sought by the United Nations.
The United Nations was founded in 1946 to prevent future world wars. With 193 member states, it is the biggest intergovernmental organization on the planet. The trouble however is evident. There are superpowers in its membership and middling powers. They all jostle for power like bulls, with little hope for technology like Bitcoin emerging in a climate where the superpowers often exert their will over the others.
To get Bitcoin past all that adrenaline would have been like a peasant trying to walk past all the guards at the gates to the palace of a Roman Emperor. At the height of the Empire’s power.
With Bitcoin, there would be a way for governments to create simple transparent contracts on the blockchain that could not be changed but moreover, could even be traded as currency, contracts cannot be botched, and will get more valuable as the coins they are attached to are scarce. You can be certain the majority would follow the protocol rules.
I mean, who wouldn’t want their signature on a piece of paper about say “acceptance to uphold democracy” get more valuable over time, and to even be traded as currency in countries where they are not Secretary of the Treasury??
Sounds like a politician’s fairy tale.
How the shift to accepting BTC would emerge is as uncertain as how Satoshi could have got close enough to make the then UN President Ali Abdussalam Teki and his comrades, see Bitcoin for its potential as a UN technology.
Of course, the idea would be unsavory to the United States of America in the beginning, upon finding it out, as the USA enjoys the privileged position of holding the currency for international foreign exchange and balance of trade payments. You bet a lot of American politicians would be most unhappy with the whole thing.
However, because the shift to a Bitcoin standard would not happen overnight, the US would have time to accept the changes on the horizon and plan to hedge its power.
Bitcoin would be seen as some nerd’s experiment, so I wouldn’t imagine a beginning with Bitcoin nodes and miners being set up faster than military hardware during the days of World War 2. But I see the heads of the DoD smiling, waiting for the big fat contract. Then President Obama shakes his head and says, "This is going to the Foreign Affairs Department. It is a peaceful technology we are trying out”.
The Genie is out of the bottle
It was a good idea to sell Bitcoin as a technology for individual users challenging government-created inflation through currency printers, but more interesting would have been if Satoshi Nakamoto had created Bitcoin and sold the idea to governments first, only for citizen users to find out later.
I’m not sure when the first user would have got on board, but it may still have been the great Hal Finney. This would have happened in 2014 or so, sometime after governments have kept it an indoor thing. A big secret that big corporations have no idea about. But politicians love to talk and somebody would have let it spill.
And what do you know, some company is also setting up mining equipment? They would be banned. Oops, you cannot put a cage around radio waves. Not when they are traveling all over the world. Big behemoths in the data game would then get in - Google, Amazon, Microsoft, list them. Then a few billionaires on a personal basis.
Circa. 2016
This top-down approach to orange-pilling human beings on a technology that works best from the bottom-up would have been real fun. A bull run that we all pride in.
Like an inside joke, everybody and their grandmother would set up a node. Not because they are maxis, software gurus or great monetary philosophers. Just because their President was funny when he tried to stop them on TV, “UN currency is UN contracts, stop trading it as money or you will be imprisoned. Even worse, if anybody is found mining it, they will be imprisoned for life!”
Not long thereafter, it would become evident that stopping people from using valuable things doesn’t work. Beat them, and fuel the rise of underground miners you couldn’t have dreamed of. Silent, profitable protest. The governments will give up and will then make it a point to regulate people who want to mine and make sure they pay their fair share in Bitcoin taxes. Meanwhile, they, governments, would retain the maximal hash rate.
Over time, mutual respect for national currencies would also develop, as inflationary money printing would continually chase the people of the inflating country into the UN’s Bitcoin. The pandemic would have been handled much better, there would be little reason to be a raged youth on Twitter, and we would be worried collectively about the fact that we just heated the climate big time to 2 degrees Celsius. Reason – Weirdly competitive Bitcoin (United Nations’ Bitcoin) mining, pushing the hash rate to well over 500 zetta hashes per second. Bitcoin would probably be consuming as much energy as Africa. Not Africa’s energy, don’t get it wrong.
Climate people would hate this world. At least they’d live well, and their world would (possibly) have no war between any two countries, for any reason.
2023
To end, 2023 in our hypothetical world would be a year of great enthusiasm. Everybody would be eagerly anticipating the halving, everybody would know how Bitcoin helps facilitate the transition to clean energy, so climate huggers would be happy too.
It would be Barbie land.
The worry of the day would be why Elon Musk’s huge rocket keeps failing to reach orbit, but we would still be supportive. Oh, almost forgot, “cryptocurrencies” would be something nobody thinks about. Because they wouldn’t exist. Because governments, who own Bitcoin by proxy through the UN, would not have allowed it. So the scams of FTX would not have happened and Mr. Sam Bankman Fried would not be in jail. A lot of bad things would not have happened.
Bad things that would have happened, hmm, maybe a lot of fires. From overheated mining operations. And a heating climate. A plan to stop a climate catastrophe would no doubt be top of the COP28 agenda, backed by the full might of UN Bitcoin.
Maybe a United Federation of Planets would be dreamed up by some genius SciFi author in a novel to sit next to Dune in the Hall of Fame. Because you can be certain, we humans would once again be very excited about the future.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to reality. Most governments just tolerate BTC, 30000 cryptocurrencies exist and Bitcoiners keep droning the same mantra on Twitter – stack sats, hodl. Meanwhile, Bitcoin keeps dancing like a bat so most grandmas wouldn’t touch BTC with a ten-foot pole.
But we can still dream.