Topic: USA lose oil but will replace with btc and crypto (Read 176 times)

In general Germany has a strong Internet/datacenter industry, and there is also the VPN topic, there may be many nodes connecting via VPN to Frankfurt, due DE-CIX.

But that is true for the US as well, the US also serve customers all over the world with their datacenters. Most South American internet companies for example host their infrastructure in the US, and it would not be surprising if South American full Bitcoin node operators would also set up them mostly in the US.

Anyway the topic of this thread, I think at least , is the cryptodollar. We could describe it as the importance for countries to count with a good number of Bitcoin owners and producers - in this case the US, where it could strengthen their own currency because people have to buy US dollars to buy Bitcoins from Americans. The mechanism is a bit different from the petro-dollar, but its effect should be similar if the assumption of the OP was true.

It is quite difficult to find data about the Bitcoin ownership distribution per country. Of course there are websites like Bitcoin Treasuries, dominated by American companies, but the amounts owned by the companies and states listed there are relatively small, about 12% of the total if we include financial companies and entities like MtGox. So from more than 80% of all Bitcoins the location is unknown.

I think the US ETFs for sure strengthened the US position in Bitcoin holdings. But their customers may not be all Americans, not even the majority. Anyway, it matters for the "cryptodollar" assumption because non-American US ETF customers have to pay USD at least to an intermediary to buy the Bitcoin ETFs. Thus their contribution to the "cryptodollar strenght" is positive as long as their inflow is positive, but if they begin to sell, they will be net negative for the "cryptodollar".

(slightly OT) It depends what you want to do with the node. Say you're a merchant and simply want to have a node you trust yourself and can control via your own SSH access without the (low) risk of attacks on SPV. Or you want to query it without submitting your address/public key list to an Electrum node for example. There are lots of good use cases. Of course if you want to contribute to decentralization then the strategy isn't ideal.

To be fair EU is not a nation, it's combination of nations, so China is number one, and USA is number two. Wouldn't you want your nation to be in that kind of list? Something where China is number one and USA is number two? I would love to see my nation there.

Simply because it also means that we are capable of paying for it, while these nations are importing Oil, they are also capable of paying for it as well, and everyone is willing to send them their oil in order to get paid. If the nation I am living was rich enough to be in top two, that would have been a great thing for me as well. In the end, of course we should stop using oil if we can, but that doesn't mean that we should be sad to be rich enough to buy that much.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_d_nus_mbblpd_a_cur.htm

I agree that it needs its own dedicated topic and I'm no expert on this subject but I can say the oil they import from West Asia is "light" not low quality. Light oil is super easy to both extract and refine to get products such as petrol.
On the other hand the oil found in America (North and South) continent is heavy oil which is extremely difficult to extract in most cases and refining it is hard and costly as well. In fact this is why they import so much hydrocarbons and petroleum products. AFAIK one of the destinations for our natural gas condensate exports is America to refine that heavy oil.

Do you really think that the USA doesn't care about oil? You underestimate the power of oil and overestimate the power of Bitcoin and crypto.

I bet Germany is popular because of Contabo, they have datacenters in Frankfurt am Main and Nürnberg, it's super easy to set up Bitcoin node on Contabo too but what I don't understand is that isn't it pointless to run hundreds of nodes under one company? It's pointless if they are centralized, then one running node is already enough.

Yes, but the USA imports lots of low quality crude, then refines it and exports it. I think that the discussion about the USA & oils really deserves a dedicated topic. That's a very interesting thing.

I have never heard about this, can you give me a citation?

I know that the USA has a huge amount of natural gas, which is where the vast majority of its fuel comes from - and actually it might have the biggest natural gas reserve or production, but I'm not exactly sure which one.

They still import oil from the middle east for some reason.

But yeah, this will hurt things like Treasury bonds for sure.

While bitcoin is definitely an asset that all governments should be looking into, if a government doesn't dip their toes into crypto they wouldn't feel such a difference in their economic state. Of course I think crypto can improve their economic situation but if a country doesn't get any more oil from their sources, the following events will happen:
> usa would highly depend on their own produced oil
> they might experience a reduced energy supply
> oil/energy will be more expensive due to lack of resource
> other expenses like food, transportation, and other manufactured products/services.
I have an idea that other countries are alreadyon that way. BRICS is very keen on their dedollarization movement while third world countries who depend on the us can't do much because they are less powerful and capable than the us.

Congratulations you found a t that wasn't crossed and an i that wasn't dotted while missing the whole discussion

What is the connection between oil and crypto?

Oil is used for multiple purposes in different industries. While crypto is a valuable asset I don't think there are dire consequences if the US were to stop using bitcoin compared to if they stopped outsourcing oil from other countries,

Even if US themselves is a producer of oil, they are also one of the biggest consumers of oil in the world so just relying on their own oil might not be ideal for them.
_{(https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/oil-consumption-by-country)}

I don't understand how crypto plays in this.

That is not true:
 

• European Union    14,060,000
• China    10,852,615    
• United States    5,877,000    
• India    4,033,050    
• South Korea    2,660,369    
• Japan    2,472,364    
• Germany    1,671,178    
• Spain    1,104,594    
• Italy    1,014,241    
• Netherlands    997,769    

Data from 2017 to 2022
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_imports

This is not exactly what's happening though.
The Arab dictators (UAE, al-Saud, Qatar, etc.) purchase their security and their survival from US regime. For the past couple of years it has been proven that not only US is incapable of protecting them, but also they are not willing to!

We saw this in the past decade during the US-Arab coalition invasion of Yemen. The day Yemeni forces started bombing the hell out of the invaders infrastructure deep into their territories (in case of US, the US bases in Arab countries) these dictators realized that US military is too weak to protect them.

So they have been moving away like a parasite from one host to another. That another is China.
They are now trying to buy their security and survival (to keep their illegitimate dictatorships) from China.
That is why they have decreased their usage of US dollar.

The only problem is that China is not US. They won't do the same thing for these dictators as US did. For example they won't help them suppress the people who would rise up against their oppression, China may not stay silent next time they chopped another reporter into little pieces like Khashoggi, etc.
This is why you can't say they are truly "moving away". It remains to be seen. At best they've moved away a little. They are still pretty much dependent on US regime to keep their dictatorships alive.

What do you mean "they have"? You do realize that Bitcoin is decentralized and all the altcoins are centralized elsewhere (in control of some dude in his basement). It is not owned by any government, least of which US.

And USA is the biggest importer of oil as well.

That doesn't work either.
The reason why Petrodollar scam worked was because they could force the world to use dollar when they wanted to trade petroleum. They did that using tools at their disposal such as United Nations, Arab dictators that controlled vast amounts of oil, etc.
They do not have the same control or means to force the world to use dollar when they want to trade bitcoin for example. There are US-based exchanges but they don't dominate the market. For example Coinbase only has 2% of the total  trading volume.

Luckily for the US that rule is only good for you.
Do you really believe that they have a watchdog just to see who is dropping out of the 4 Race?
That apart it is SWIFT what makes the system work. That system enables passing judgements on all wires, those wires basically touch US soil. 

Other countries, especially the BRICS bloc, are increasingly reducing their dependence on the USD and that process is happening quite quickly. If they can do it with USD then they can do the same with bitcoin if the US holds the majority of bitcoin and wants bitcoin as another solution to manipulate the world. If the US makes this move, they want to rely on an asset they cannot control, which means they are destroying themselves faster.
Clearly, OP is being quite delusional and over-exaggerating about bitcoin, and politicians are not as stupid as we think.

Makes sense to me but my question is, if the USA are looking forward to adopting the Crypto And BTC as a product to sell in the market for the world, won't that action alone defeat the aim of Bitcoin serving as a decentralized financial system and won't that bring about the USA's usual efforts to dominate and monopolize to the best, any market they break into? Another thing to ask is that bringing about the BTC and Crypto currencies won't affect the power of the dollar and the longevity? Or does it make more sense to say that, if the USA do not start looking at how to diversify the dollar by stylishly infusing the crypto technology into it, for instance, the dollar and the USA are not going to survive the power they have over the international market like they do in the nearest future?

USA cares because every global trade, every country, that moves away from USD weakens the USD and therefore the US itself. That international trades are beginning to use other currencies matters to them. That countries are slashing their US reserves matters to them.

And while you may attach so much value to Bitcoin, US may not be seeing it that way. Otherwise, they would have already bought so much and even made it a valuable reserve. Let's be realistic.

For the OP as he seems to need more input data  :

Oil production USA about 310 t Barrels a day.

source: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eia-forecasts-larger-records-2024-us-oil-output-global-demand-2024-06-11/

While its consumption was about 20.000.000 B/D
United States Oil Consumption was reported at 19,140.000 Barrel/Day th in Dec 2022

source: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/oil-consumption


source: https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-does-us-government-hold-more-200000-bitcoin-1790613

Are you really sure about that?

The US has approximately:

- 28% of all Bitcoin nodes according to https://bitnodes.io/nodes/all/ (#1 before Germany, but the EU as a whole has more nodes)
- 10%, or 55 millons, of crypto users, according to https://triple-a.io/cryptocurrency-ownership-data/ (#3 after India with 90 million and China with 60 milion. It's interesting that as a percentage of the population, the UAE has the highest ownership ratio at 25%, while the US has about 15.5%)
- 37% of mining operations as of 2024 (according to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bitcoin-mining-by-country). This looks quite high, but take into account that it is a recent phenomenon, and historically China was dominant - in the "Chinese-dominated" mining period the majority of all Bitcoins were mined, while post-2021 it's only a little fraction.

So of course it's a strong crypto region in most indicators. But its importance is quite consistent with its overall economic importance, so the US for example have a share of about 25% of the world's GDP.  There are some fields in the crypto industry where the US is not leading, mainly exchanges (Binance is located in the Cayman Islands, which are part of the UK), and exchanges are some of the biggest crypto holders too.

Yes, the US ETFs, MicroStrategy and US-based mining are definitely accumulating a lot of Bitcoins. But ETFs and other crypto-based financial products are also appearing in other parts of the world, and have even existed before the US ETFs (Jacobi ETF in Guernsey, Hashdex ETFs in Brazil/UK, Canadian ETFs, and now also Australia, Thailand and Hong Kong ETFs) .

This doesn't mean this move will end the US petro dollar for their crude oil settlement, or they will totally do away with their trades with the United States, as this will hurt their economy and security if they do so because they've been purchasing military equipments from the United States for the past decades, but it means they're trying to use what they called m bridge for a potential alternative to the swift payment system thereby modernizing their means of payment.

As China is the biggest oil importer in the world, now here's the deal, Saudi Arabia wants to increase their international sales and strengthen ties with China and as well as leveraging on the existing relationship with the United States thereby becoming a key global player here, I think Saudi Arabia is trying to balance its relationship with both parties without hugely depending on their trades with the United States (the US dollars).

They do care and will be pained in the ass. Demand for a currency gives it value, even the US can't deny that, they need the relationship to be stringer so as they trade, their is a mutual benefit they gain between the two party and let me tell you again that US doesn't have BTC, at least not public and doesn't have crypto, you clearly see how it being fought over and over just because they don't like it and their decisions many times has made the market blee.

The idea of petro dollar is just might that will be difficult to create, look at the CBDC that has cause a lot of controversies, the Trump said if he wins the election, he is going to closed down CBDC  as he see that as a waste of tax payer money. They don't want anything that compete with their dollar so, kill that idea and think about something to spend your time.

I got the concept of how crypto can help USA but we cannot compare between oil and crypto and crypto cannot replace and act as an alternative to crypto and if this happens then USA will be the one without a basic resource. I mean how long can USA bank in their crude oil? I don't think Arab nations will move away from USA as they are puppets and it's mutually beneficial for both of them to be on same page.

I don't see it happening! US has always kept a multifaceted approach when it comes to their finances and economy in general. While the dollar is usually referred as Petro dollar, US has always kept other options open! So I don't see US adopting cryptocurrency to back their currency system, ever! It's like an open secret but a major chunk of their revenue comes from military equipment. In 2023 alone, US made a little over $238 billion by exporting military equipment. So they have got their backup.

US will never indulge into something which they can't fully control. So I don't see crypto becoming a reserve for US dollar, ever!