Before Israel - Palestine conflict, I did not even consider such a possibilities ( USA is sending a second aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean ).
What if USA will be in the war in future or any international conflict that can lead to the war - USA government can confiscate Bitcoins with USA based blockchain nodes + exchanges for war expenses. There are already 19 millions mined
BTC worldwide, so this can be real war budget booster for weapons and other expenses. USA currently also has $33.54 trillion in federal debt, so if there are such international conflict, mined Bitcoins seizing for war budget can be really on the White House decision table.
List of wars involving the United States -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_StatesLook also here -
The economics of war. How does this affect us all especially us in crypto?The total current worth of bitcoin in circulation is about $526,896,225,000 which is a substantial amount to finance its war expenses. But the question now is how will the US government confiscate a decentralized currency. They can achieve this if all the Bitcoin is kept in centralized exchanges located on the US which is not the case. The US doesn't need to seize Bitcoin to finance war while they can easily turn to the printing press and mint more dollars.
The USA is going to length to ensure that it's not considered a country that's at war with any other country, and that position has been clear well before the Israel-Hamas war, namely in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Also, realistically, very few countries would want to go to war with the USA, considering how strong this country is economically, politically, militarily, and how it's a part of NATO. If it's a relatively small war (by small I mean something like in Afghanistan), it surely won't need to confiscate anything. If it's a huge war, I still don't think the US would want to lower the popular support that much. I mean, even much smaller countries with a much higher need for resources for the army (like Ukraine) don't do that because this is not the way. Not to mention that it'll be hard to perform such a confiscation of a digital, decentralized asset.
It is small conflict that escalates to become a big wars. This conflict between Israel and Hamas has the potential to become a protracted war. A war that cost the US government over $2.3 trillion the loss of 2,400 US servicemen and the death of over 42,000 civilians is not small. The US had to withdraw from Afghanistan when it became clear that they could not achieve their projected goals fighting a war that costs $300 million daily.