Vietnam and Afghanistan

I have had two brushes with Vietnam during my life: one was serving in the Army artillery in Vietnam during the war, the second was overseeing databases of Vietnamese who wanted to go to the United States after the war. 

When I was in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, I had very little interaction with the Vietnamese. I was in a heavy artillery battery that supported American Army soldiers on the ground.  Most of the time we were stationed at firebases in the middle of nowhere, with no Vietnamese around.  A few times we had Vietnamese units on the same firebase, but we did not interact.  They supported Vietnamese units and we supported American units.  We were in northern South Vietnam, which the Army called I Corps.  Occasionally I would ride into town with supply trucks; so, I occasionally saw Hue and Quang Tri. At Firebase Barbara, on a lonely mountaintop not too far south of Khe Sanh on the Laotian border, all of our resupply was done by helicopter.  When Saigon fell, I had no personal connection to any South Vietnamese left behind. 

At the American Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, from 1984 to 1986, I was in charge of the embassy’s computers.  I was primarily responsible for the computers in the embassy, which mainly handled administrative tasks like maintaining personnel and financial records.  However, as the senior computer person in the embassy, I had oversight responsibility for several other computer operations.  One of them handled data for the Orderly Departure Program for Vietnamese still in Vietnam who wanted to leave the country.  The Orderly Departure Program had been established to try to stop the dangerous exodus of Vietnamese “boat people.” Another handled data for Vietnamese refugees who had already escaped across Laos or Cambodia to Thai refugee camps and who wanted to go to the United States.  This was about ten years after the fall of Saigon, but I don’t know how many of these people had worked for the US during the war. 

According to Wikipedia, from 1980 to 1997, 623,509 Vietnamese were resettled abroad under the Orderly Departure Program, of whom 458,367 went to the United States.  As I recall, a friend at the embassy in Bangkok who worked in the Orderly Departure Program went to Vietnam about once a week to process a planeload of Vietnamese going to the US.  Outside of the Orderly Departure Program, the number of “boat people” leaving Vietnam and arriving safely in another country totaled almost 800,000 between 1975 and 1995.  The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that between 200,000 and 400,000 boat people died at sea without reaching their destination.  About 40,000 Vietnamese refugees were held in Thai border refugee camps until they could be resettled. 

If Vietnam is an example, there will continue to be many refugees fleeing Afghanistan for years to come. 

 

Bitcoin

Cybercurrencies are here to stay.  Maybe Bitcoin is too, but not at the levels it currently holds.  Tulips are still here, but the tulip mania of the 1630s has passed.  Bitcoin was originally intended to be a medium of exchange that would be insulated from almost all external control.  This anonymity made it an excellent means of exchange for illegal activities, most recently illustrated by the fact that most of the ransomware attacks on private data have demanded payment in Bitcoin. 

Bitcoin transactions are recorded by blockchain, which is like an old accounting ledger.  It contains every Bitcoin transaction, although looking at blockchain from the outside, you can tell that a transaction is verified, but you cannot tell who the parties were or how much Bitcoin was involved.  As one of the parties to the transaction, however, you can pull out the specific information.  So, if Elon Musk for example says you never paid him for your Tesla, you can prove that you did using blockchain. 

The Economist magazine recently explored what would happen to the financial markets if Bitcoin went to zero.  It illustrates how far Bitcoin has come from mainly being a payment mechanism for drug dealers and other criminals to store of value rivaling gold bullion.  Many old school financial institutions -- banks, hedge funds, and payment systems like PayPal -- have begun to invest in and accept Bitcoin.  The Economist speculates that a Bitcoin crash would also crash the broader financial markets, and the more widely accepted Bitcoin becomes, the bigger the crash would be.  Because there is so much speculation today in Bitcoin, much of the investment is leveraged, likely leading to margin calls and liquidations in the event of a Bitcoin crash. 

The Economist says that “because changing dollars for bitcoin is slow and costly, traders wanting to realize gains and reinvest proceeds often transact in stablecoins” pegged to the dollar, like Tether.  The fact that traders think Bitcoin transactions are slow and costly is ironic, since Bitcoin was conceived as a payment mechanism.  But the reliance on Tether and other stablecoins creates problems for these currencies, which are somewhat like money market funds that are vulnerable if they are insufficiently backed, which many regulators believe they are. 

It is ironic that as Bitcoin has become seen as a store of value, it has become less used as a transaction mechanism, which was its original purpose.  But many Bitcoin proponents tout Bitcoin as a way for the poor, unbanked people around the world to participate in the financial system with their wealthier cohorts. 

Because of that prospect of some kind of cybercoin becoming a worldwide medium of exchange, central banks around the world, like the US Federal Reserve, are looking a creating cybercurrencies that would not have some of the negative aspects of Bitcoin.  If cybercurrencies become widespread, will that take some of the luster off of Bitcoin. 

Bitcoins will always represent the massive amounts of energy that were required to produce them.  This unenvironmental aspect of Bitcoin is supposedly what make Elon Musk change his mind and refuse to accept Bitcoins for Teslas.  If Bitcoin were to go to zero, that would be an awful lot of wasted energy and greenhouse gases. 

Bitcoin will have to find its long-term value.  When it was first being mined, it was worth a few thousand dollars.  I would guess that in the long term, it will return to something like that, less than $10,000 per Bitcoin.  It will retain some value as a medium of exchange for criminals, since national cybercurrencies will be more traceable.  Also, national central banks will probably be able to print their new cybercurrencies like the Fed now prints paper dollars, making the new currencies less valuable as a hedge against inflation.