1/ Did you know, that the Vietnam war was a major contributor to the US going off the Gold Standard (aka the "Nixon shock"), which gave birth to the international fiat currencies system that we know today? 
2/ The Vietnam war was a senseless war that killed 3 millions people & crippled a beautiful country (my motherland). The US dropped 8 million tons of bombs in Vietnam- which is 3 times *the total amount used by all forces* in WW2.
3/ In the words of US Air Force general Curtis LeMay, the idea was to “bomb them back to the Stone Age.”
4/ The use of chemical weapons, especially Agent Orange (manufactured under contract by Monsanto), was especially devastating. 73 million liters of toxic agents was sprayed over 4.5 million acres of Central & South Vietnam. Soil & water is seriously contaminated until this day.
5/ Millions of people who were exposed to these chemicals developed cancers later in life- including many US veterans. A cruel fate for those who thought they had survived the war.
6/ Hundreds of thousands of 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation children were born with serious birth defects, long after the war. Vietnam was set back decades economically.
7/ So why did this cruel & inhumane war happen in the first place? For no good reasons. To quote the Australian journalist @johnpilger: “There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous.”
8/ The origin of the Vietnam war went back to WW2. The rise of the superpowers & Cold War mentality were what spawned a series of proxy wars in Vietnam, Korea, the Middle East, South & Central America and other places around the world in the 20th century.
9/ Vietnam war was fought in the name of Democracy, but in reality was created out of fundamental misunderstandings (Domino Theory), kept going thru a combination of continued miscalculations, arrogance & the selfish desire of a few Presidents & their parties to hold on to power.
10/ Spreading Democracy has always been a lie: small nations are nothing but pawns pushed around to serve big nations’ interests. As apparent in this Department of Defense memo from John McNaughton to McNamara- the architect of the war.
11/ All in all, the US spent 168 billion of dollars in Vietnam (roughly 1 trillion dollars in today’s terms), which stressed the already fragile US economy to the limits. To give some context, “billion” of debt was outrageous & “trillion” was unthinkable in those days.
12/ When the US was “forced off” the Gold Standard, where did all that freely printed fiat money go? To fill the massive hole of debt & repay obligations incurred during the war.
13/ In some sense, you can say that the Vietnam war & Nixon’s decision to leave the Gold Standard set up the monetarily irresponsible environment that led to the global financial crisis we saw decades later. Which led to the rise of Bitcoin, an antidote to that irresponsibility.
14/ This isn’t to imply in any way that the Gold Standard was perfect. But at least with Gold, governments’ ability to freely print money is severely limited & the risks of capital misallocation & rising wealth inequality are kept in check.
15/ Vietnam was not the first war that caused a government to print money excessively & bankrupt themselves. WWI & the decline of Roman Empire were other famous examples.
16/ Violence has always had a close relationship with money. They feed on each other. Money is needed to finance violence, and (monopoly on) violence in turn extracts money & begets more violence.
17/ It would be a mistake to overlook this relationship when we think about Bitcoin. Could Bitcoin change the equation?
18/ Would a world run by Bitcoin, with potentially less powerful governments & more individual (financial) sovereignty, be less violent? Or more? Only time can tell.
*Credit for above passage: @EdConwaySky telegraph.co.uk/finance/commen…
