[argumentum]

""The Federal Reserve System (also known as the Federal Reserve, and informally as the Fed) is the central banking system of the United States. It was created on December 23, 1913, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, largely in response to a series of financial panics, particularly a severe panic in 1907"" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System

The common argument is that the modern, global economy is too complex to govern itself, and prone to disasters.

[aggronn]

I'm not sure how this relates to my comment. Its not a binary issue of whether a currency can or cannot function on its own. Currencies functioned on their own okay before, and after the Fed, they've arguable done better. Whether you believe it or not is immaterial to my point--we have a wealth of evidence that robust currency can exist without a central authority. Just because bitcoin rebounds after some period of time doesn't mean that a) it wouldn't have been worse if there was central authority and regulation, b) that the rebound is translatable to other currencies, or to other crises, c) that the rebound was a result of anything other than exogenous increases in demand.