This petrodollar thesis is a stretch. If anything bitcoin increases demand for oil especially due to illicit mining using stolen oil.<p>We park military in the Middle East mostly due to religious extremist and terrorism risk. Bitcoin does not change that. But even if we park military in the US mostly due to oil, bitcoin doesn't change that either! Bitcoin increases our need for energy.
So we're just going to ignore that BTC itself can't really be used at all without a giant global supply chain that makes all the computing components it ends up consuming <i>on top of</i> all the electricity it burns?
This just seems like a deliberately misleading article. Just taking a glance at it you've got to think straight off -Well sure, dollars go to Saudi Arabia et al, and sure, some of that might end up in treasuries eventually, but let's not pretend that it's anything like responsible for <i>all</i> the value of the dollar.<p>So I looked it up. How much oil does the US import? It is a net exporter. This article takes a view of the world as it might have been in 2005, but it isn't today.<p>Even if you buy the idea that the petrodollar is something America does encourage (using strategic alliances with oil producing countries to keep the dollar the reserve currency in order to use it for diplomatic reasons) that has nothing to do with the carbon cost of the dollar. It's to do with the carbon cost of the US trying to project international power.<p>It's these sort of articles that make me even more suspicious of Bitcoin ownership.
Considering the environmental impact of the US economy and its policies is important in its own right, but applying that to the dollar is a stretch in my opinion. Also, the dollar is not the only traditional currency in the world.