| > By backing I meant a .gov's ability to tax or confiscate wealth, or for that matter impose capital controls. Neither of these are an advantage of a fiat currency. They are both very bad for users of the currency. These are precisely the reasons people prefer Bitcoin. > Might I be missing something? Yeah, although I can't imagine how. People don't like having their money stolen or messed with. That seems fairly clear to me. Bitcoin makes it a lot harder to do either of those things, which is an advantage. > if shit hits the fan, my dollars are worth whatever US .gov and its taxpayers agree they're OK with This statement doesn't make any sense. Can you please explain what your reasoning is here? Not to be condescending, but this sounds like you only have a very vague idea of what value is. > backed by .gov's ability to enforce (through all of the latter three points) that it's worth this or that. This is a very important lesson to absorb; a government cannot "enforce" a value. That doesn't even make sense. The closest thing they could do is kill people who use the market value, in which case all you're doing is devaluing other currencies by making them more dangerous to use. This catches up with you very quickly, when you can no longer afford to interact with external markets that don't have a crazy military trying to shoot the truth out of existence. > with no ability to say "hey we've a taxpayer down the line" Again, what does this even mean? The dollar doesn't derive its value from the existence of people who pay taxes in USD. Not even close. > If the thing goes crashing to the ground, there's no guarantee anyone will pickup the tab If the dollar goes crashing to the ground, no one will "pick up the tab either". > fiat money, where a Nation's work output offers some guarantee on the value. OK, this also doesn't make any sense. Fiat money doesn't entitle you to dividends sourced from tax revenue. There is zero relationship between the number of dollars and the "work output" of the US. What region's "work output" is gold tied to? Again, I'm not intending to be condescending here, but I'm not sure how else to say this; I think you have a very deep and fundamental misunderstanding of what money actually is. Most of your arguments here "aren't even wrong", so to speak. They are just completely out of the ball park. There's no easy fix for this, and I can't recommend any particular reading. There are probably some good economics courses on coursera or something. But if you take nothing else away from this post, at least take this: having a dollar entitles you to nothing from the government. The government makes no guarantees about the dollar. The only relationship between the dollar and the US government is that it's the "approved" payment method for court-mandated debt repayments and tax payments, and enjoys a number of less significant legal privileges, especially w.r.t bank regulation and government debt instruments. |