Blockchain Solution Brings Kazakhstan Bloodshed
How Silicon Valley culture of greed created authoritarian violence in Kazakhstan
You may have seen the headlines about violent political turmoil taking place across Kazakhstan, but chances are you thought it had nothing to do with you. After all, you don’t live in Kazakhstan. You live somewhere apparently far removed from Kazakhstan, in a city such as San Francisco, London, or Lisbon. The bloodshed in Kazakhstan seems like a story that matters over there, not where you are.
What matters where you are? Cryptocurrency seems to matter. You’ve heard stories about people making huge amounts of money by investing in cryptocurencies like Bitcoin, and the profits seeming to come out of thin air.
The plain truth is this: Profits never come out of thin air.
When you don’t know where profits are coming from, that’s because their source is hidden. It’s hidden because someone doesn’t want you to see what’s happening there.
There’s a bloody revolution in Kazakhstan right now because wealthy Westerners don’t want to look at where their crypto assets have come from.
Wealth held in cryptocurrency has been coming from places such as Kazakhstan, which is home to one-fifth of the world’s Bitcoin mining operations. Bitcoin mining operations in Kazakhstan run huge banks of computers day and night, consuming immense amounts of electricity, created by burning dirty fossil fuels. The profits go almost exclusively to foreigners, in places like Europe and the United States.
Bitcoin mining operations swarmed to Kazakhstan because of the country’s authoritarian centralized government and cheap fossil fuels. There are few pesky regulations to deal with in centralized authoritarian countries like Kazakhstan, and cryptocurrency investors love it.
Forget what the cryptocurrency faithful and blockchain afficionados tell you about decentralization. The big players in cryptocurrency markets prefer to operate in countries controlled by dictatorial strongmen precisely because the centralized governments there are corrupt, and will look the other way no matter how badly blockchain schemes abuse the general population. A little bribery is all it takes to keep the arrangement well-protected.
So many Bitcoin miners began operations under the centralized government of Kazakhstan last year that soon, they began to burn through the country’s surplus fossil fuels, quadrupling the typical rate of increases in energy consumption. With supplies low, energy prices began to skyrocket, to the point that average Kazakh families could no longer afford to heat their homes. Rolling blackouts left families without power in the middle of winter.
That’s why there has been a popular uprising in Kazakhstan. It’s not because of obscure internal Kazakh politics that Westerners can’t understand. The unrest in Kazakhstan is a result of the economic devastation caused by predatory Bitcoin miners.
As an autocracy, the centralized government of Kazakhstan has not responded well to popular protests. Kazakh government security forces have been given orders to fire their weapons at peaceful protesters. The order is to shoot to kill.
People in Kazakhstan are being killed in order to defend the power of Bitcoin investors. The next time you wonder what a blockchain solution looks like, think of the blood of Kazakh protesters lying in the dead in the streets. That’s the “freedom” that blockchain ideology has brought to the world.
Journalists in Europe and the United States don’t seem to be worried much about what the people of Kazakhstan are going through, however. Instead, their concern is for wealthy cryptocurrency investors.
In order to crush the popular uprising against cryptocurrency-fueled corruption and inflation, the government of Kazakhstan temporarily shut down the nation’s Internet. This interfered with the ability of Bitcoin miners to keep generating wealth for themselves.
A headline from The Guardian: “Kazakhstan internet shutdown deals blow to global bitcoin mining operation”.
A CNBC headline: “Kazakhstan’s deadly protests hit bitcoin, as the world’s second-biggest mining hub shuts down”.
For the record, Bitcoin investors aren’t being hit. Cryptocurrency investors aren’t being dealt blows. They’re losing some of the value in their extensive financial portfolios.
The people of Kazakhstan are being hit with bullets. They’re suffering the blows from their own country’s police and military, who have been called out into the streets to defend the economic interests of European and American cryptocurrency investors.
That’s what true tyranny looks like.
Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture of greed doesn’t give a damn about the abuses of centralized governments, just so long as the blood money keeps flowing.
