With all the talk of the US dollar losing its status (highly unlikely due to no realistic alternative), How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future on the history of various previously predominant currencies is also interesting:
There's no obvious alternative but there's nothing stopping other countries from using other currencies than dollars to do transactions, just the infrastructure that supports it. It feels like the dollar is more stable than other countries currencies, due in large part to our strong economy and strong military. China is big enough that they can probably do transactions in their currency, but any week they can significantly devalue it.
Wow, thanks for posting that. I wasn't away RMB was not used that much up to now. US + Euro is 9/12 of that trading on the imf.org link. 9/12, 75%! Maybe a little of that could switch to rmb in trading with china, but as china is such a huge economy in the world, close to the US in many ways (ignoring their current problems/shrinkage), isn't the minuscule amount of RMB transactions just another sign that everyone is using dollars.
How much is the total US transactions with China, would like to compare to the charts to see theoretical maximum.