IllogicalLogic

If Assange leaked Chinese intelligence secrets, would he be free right now? I expect so.

I'm not sure the whole "China is uniquely evil" idea that is expressed in these comments stands up to even the smallest scrutiny.

>How does a country declare a Cold War, anyways?

Simple, just don't cooperate with western capitalists looking to plunder an area, a Cold War will be declared shortly after.

>I don't think anyone would disagree that she's a pawn in a geopolitical struggle, but it also sounds like she absolutely and intentionally violated US law

Someone that didn't visit the US was arrested for "breaking US law"...replace "US" with "China" and see how this sentence rings.

Sounds like a surviving version of Victorian "blame the victim" thinking. It was a popular and heavily flawed idea that the people the British invaded and robbed (of food in many cases), if faced with food shortages, should have just "had less kids".

When a parasite finds a good host, the logic can get really warped.

I find people's lack of knowledge about what makes Bitcoin valuable interesting.

The reason Bitcoin is valuable is because the work required to create one is significantly harder than Fiat currencies and it is one of the only truly scarce assets in human history (hard cap).

How much equipment do you need to counterfeit any fiat currency? Can you purchase the equipment for less than $10k?

Yes, easy.

How much equipment do you need to counterfeit Bitcoin? Can you purchase the equipment for less than $1 billion?

No, not easy.

You may think this is a trivial distinction but it has tremendous value knowing you have hard uncounterfeitable money with a hard cap.

The US treasury spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year fighting fake bills, that's only 1 of the dozen or so problems bitcoin solves. The second is that all the verification and security is done by the most powerful supercomputer in human history.

These things gives it its value.

Garbage company stocks, you can throw those in the trash if the central banks aren't busy helping pump them.

Hard money wins, soft money gets snuffed in the night.

Not whataboutism, if the case can be made that 350 million people need protection then the case can more easily be made for 1.3 billion people.

Wikileaks also showed us that US agencies were engaged in industrial espionage, stealing German/French industrial technology using the Five Eyes tools and giving it to GE & friends ...

The problem is, my more "reality-based" framing destroys the "China is uniquely evil" narrative that western media/gov is pushing everywhere for primarily economic reasons.

I don't buy that idea, western institutions that we generally think of as unique are quite easy to duplicate in Asia if the focus is put there.

So China is publicly announcing that it's deploying what the Five Eyes have deployed in democratic countries under the cover of darkness across the world (while lying to their citizens, who have a constitutional right to know)?

Points for transparency.