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Risk Mgmt and tabnloz

The Middle East is a snake pit, a den of vipers far worse than what Trump has found in Washington.  I remember reading an old Yemeni saying:

"Touch Yemen, get burned."  I believe that you could extend that saying to include Syria, Iraq, Libya, etc.......

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are getting burned there in Yemen, losing much blood and treasure...

Risk Mgmt: I have about run out of candidates to become the "new (under-rated) entity to clean up the Middle East".  Do you have anyone in mind?  China, Russia, Iran and Israel are about the only countries there who "count".  Turkey?  Ahh, I doubt it.  Egypt?  Ahh...

It is starting to look like Israel is slowly becoming allies of a sort with the Saudis, Jordanians and the Egyptians.  Will this hold?  I don't know.  I think tabnloz has the right idea re understanding US policy: for whatever faults the Saudi monarchy has (lots), they would likely be much better than a radical government that would take their place.

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Re BTC production, my technical understanding is weak.  But, I believe that electricity cost may wind up being the largest single factor re future production.  The ASIC machines use a lot, and the Chinese are doing whatever it takes to mine the 65% or so of new BTC (roughly TWICE the rest of the world combined).

In China, electricity cost to (some of) the miners is artificially cheap, giving them a real advantage vs. the West.

Re speculation in BTC (it's what I am doing), I HODL until a big price rise (like last week), then I buy gold with it.  Just bought some Au and Pt (platinum) with BTC.

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Mother Nature may be getting more reluctant to give up her resources as easily as in the past.  We may have reached "Peak Oil", perhaps "Peak Gold" as well.  Here is an interesting guy to follow re energy and precious metals (read him for some time to understand his views better):

https://srsroccoreport.com/

There's still a lot of "stuff" out there in the world, I am on a visit to Peru right now, and on an earlier visit "someone who might actually know" told me that there were HUGE gold reserves that were being kept quiet or not-quite-known (sounds unlikely).  But, Peru and many other countries have not been THOROUGHLY explored (who knew 20 years ago that Nevada would produce so much US gold?). 

The problem is that new deposits of many materials may become much more expensive to produce, particularly energy costs.