Good thing I did not invest much in Bitcoin...

...and by that, I mean either my money or my self-esteem.

Today, BTC China, China's largest bitcoin exchange, was shut down by the Chinese government. And this is after the government already announced on December 5 that its financial institutions were no longer allowed to deal in Bitcoin, its first attempt to regulate the currency. As of today, the People's Bank of China has informed 10 of the PRC's largest third-party payment processing companies that they were required to cease all Bitcoin transactions, or else.

Not surprisingly, Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal is delighted that he now gets to gloat in front of all the people who sent him death threats and made fun of his sexuality. He's happy to point out that since BTC China announced it would no longer be accepting deposits, the value of a Bitcoin has more than halved, from $1000 to $500.

The first time I ever posted about Bitcoin, one of the questions I asked myself was whether Bitcoin would really prove to be immune to government control and currency manipulation. I subsequently wondered what it meant that the Chinese had embraced Bitcoin, since they're the most notorious currency-manipulators in the world. Well, here are some reasons another author has suggested that Bitcoin took off in China in the first place:

• They’ve already done the whole virtual currency thing—with Q Coin.
• As a medium of exchange, Bitcoin could help Chinese people evade currency controls.
• Insane speculation schemes aren’t so crazy to many Chinese people. 
• PCs abound.
• Chinese techies are used to spending an ungodly amount of time mining virtual coins in online games.
• The government can’t track it, can’t block it, and can’t crack down on it.

All of these are, of course, very good reasons why venture capitalists in China would be happy to throw a ton of money behind Bitcoin. Then there's the possibility that by investing in Bitcoin, China is boosting Bitcoin's potential to displace the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency - a goal that the Chinese government shares with Bitcoin's founders and fanboys.

But remember that in China, the purpose of economic growth (along with almost any other government initiative, like defense modernization) is to maintain social stability and the legitimacy of the Communist Party, as we are constantly reminded by the party's own leadership. When a currency's biggest public selling point is that it's immune to government control, it should figure that the Chinese government is going to start getting nervous once reality sets in and they realize that yes, in fact, Bitcoin might in fact be something even they can't control. What's happening is that the need to make money is not always compatible with the need for control, as Quartz's Adam Pasick points out:

"Ultimately China had little choice but to crack down on bitcoin, because it made it all too easy for Chinese investors to evade already- porous currency controls and anonymously move their funds out of the country. More generally, Beijing had an aversion to a volatile, decentralized and possibly destabilizing digital currency that it could not control...By shunning bitcoin, China...may be passing up the chance to leapfrog the rest of the world by fostering the growth of bitcoin-esque digital currencies and the secure, efficient payments that they may enable. But when a country is simultaneously trying to grow, reform, and maintain tight control of its economy, something’s gotta give."

But...this is where things get a whole lot more interesting. As I was sitting down to write this blog post, I saw some new articles pop up in my Twitter feed. It seems that Bitcoin hackers have retaliated by launching DDOS attacks against the People's Bank of China web site. So just in case we (and the CCP) forgot, take note: Bitcoin isn't just an Internet currency; it's also an Internet movement with a cyber-army of hacktivists that don't take kindly to Chinese au-thor-i-tah. Now, let's see what the Bitcoin army is capable of doing; presumably, Joe Weisenthal is relieved that they've got someone to hate more than himself.

20 years of DOOM!

I'm still trying to overcome my continued posting drought and motivate myself to write again. My job/internship search is really difficult right now, so I spend more time checking Indeed.com and the Brad Traverse Group than writing (and that's when I'm not watching funny videos to ease the anxiety of being on the job market). But let me indulge in my nerd side and reminisce about Doom, which celebrated its 20th birthday this month - on December 10, to be exact. I might have forgotten about this momentous occasion had I not read an interesting little Ars Technia article in which the editors reflected on how Doom changed video gaming forever. Most people who were playing games on their personal computers in the 1990s became addicted to first-person shooters (FPS) after playing Doom, and that includes myself.

Actually, I didn't start getting into Doom until the release of the sequel in 1994, which I first played at a friend's house. Previously, I had once watched one of my Dad's graduate students playing Wolfenstein 3D, but had never been allowed to play, because this student wasn't sure I should be playing something so violent*. So one of my earliest and fondest gaming memories was when I took control of the keyboard and mouse in Doom II and scored my first chainsaw kill against a zombie. It only got more exciting once I got my hands on the game's shotgun and started capping Imps. At the time, I had seen nothing like it, and the semi-3D graphics engine seemed amazing to me back then (The Division be damned!) Unfortunately, back then, nobody I knew had even a 28.8 bps modem, so I never got to experience the online play, which is undoubtedly the single greatest contribution that Doom made to gaming (its significance was not that it was the first FPS, or even the Id Software team's first FPS.) I did try Doom online, about a decade later, but by that point, I had been playing Counter-Strike for so long that there was no way I'd ever enjoy it.

There's another, military/political science-y reason I'm reflecting on Doom: I wonder how many young men from my generation would have ever even considered serving their country had they not spent years playing FPS descendants of Doom? I know I can attribute my own interest in the military to the years I spent playing the aforementioned Counter-Strike, as well as DoD's own FPS recruitment tool, America's Army, during my teen years. There are already political scientists who have studied the effects of war toys and war movies on the militarization of the United States: See, for instance, the ironically-named Patrick Regan's groundbreaking 1994 study on this topic for the Journal of Peace Research. Personally, I'm still waiting for them to update Waltz' Man, the State, and War to think about where the popularity of FPS games falls into IR theory (I would imagine that it affects both the second-image and third-image factors in Waltz' theory). This article in the European Journal of American Studies is the closest thing I've seen to an attempt, but the journal seems a bit too Euro-lefty to be credible. I also found this article by two professors at Fordham University to be interesting, but not theoretical enough for my purposes. And that's all that Google Scholar has found for me; I guess I'll have to check out DTIC next to see what's been published.

Hopefully, Doom's next major anniversary (25th, 30th?) will provide occasion to re-visit this topic and see new scholarship on FPS games, cultural militarism, and IR theory, because I imagine there is a lot of good work to be done on this topic. When even the PLA starts getting into the gaming biz, I think it's time to regard FPS popularity as a cultural factor that can't be ignored.





*Interesting tidbit: The student in question, who was then getting his Ph.D in my Dad's research group at Duke, was none other than Carl Schnurr, who eventually became a gaming pioneer himself as the lead designer for Rainbow Six, the first "tactical shooter" FPS.

Getting back into action

I know, I know...I've been gone for way too long. I had intended to write a blog post for Veteran's Day, but I backed off, mostly because I wasn't satisfied with how it was turning out or what I had to say on the topic (here comes my perfectionist side again). Then I got really busy with my hopefully soon-to-be-published paper for work, and then I was off on Thanksgiving break. I told myself I'd catch up on reading and writing over the break, but I lied to myself. There was a lot I wanted to cover during my hiatus. But for now, I am going to briefly touch on the debate over force readiness.

Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno has been lamenting for quite some time that the Army is at "the lowest readiness levels I’ve seen within our Army since I’ve been serving for the last 37 years", as he did again earlier this month. This warning comes on top of the Army's move towards Progressive/Tiered Readiness earlier this year, which was itself controversial.

Some of my immediate thoughts on this topic:

1. Readiness is based upon fulfillment of troop strength, budgetary allocation, and training (among other things). As the article cited above mentions, Larry Korb over at the Center for American Progress has blamed the mechanism of sequestration for the Army's financial difficulties: "The Pentagon’s problems are not caused by the amount of money that is available under sequestration but by the process that requires them to cut all items in the budget, other than military personnel, by an equal amount."
2. Defense News had a really interesting article pointing out that this is not the first time we've heard the force readiness siren from top brass; indeed, I recall that in 2006, the Democrats even tried to use the detrimental effect on readiness to argue against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
3. Gauging force readiness is not the same now that the Brigade Combat Team replaced the division as the primary deployable unit in the Army; this makes me wonder whether we should  re-visit the criticisms of Lt. Col. Stephen Melton from 2005 during the force transformation process. Among other things, Melton complained about the larger staffing/C2 requirements for BCTs; one can imagine how much readiness will suffer in an austere fiscal climate if there are more people to train/mentor, more technology to master, and fewer resources by which to do it all. And since, as Larry Korb points out, the budget cuts do not affect actual military personnel, it should follow that BCTs have created more soldiers who get more entitlements - which leaves less money for equipment and training and anything else that a BCT needs that might affect its readiness for combat.
4. Bottom line: Yes, the Army might very well have far lower readiness on paper, and it might even be the "lowest in 37 years". But from where I'm standing, the real issue here is that the Army is suffering from an unanticipated side effect of the modular force transformation, rather than budgetary constraints per se.