Preserving my wealth in the event of the dollar rapidly losing value is not a problem for me. I'm 90% OK on that front without even trying particularly hard to do anything about it.
What would be a problem for me, is that a failing dollar might be a symptom of the US government failing, in which case society would be falling apart around me. If basic services like roads, infrastructure, fire and police, electricity and clean running water aren't working properly nationwide, it's going to interfere with my life big time. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly: e.g. my grocery store has trouble restocking because the supply chain is not running smoothly. Bitcoin doesn't help me with that type of problem at all.
I'd be better off trying to keep my government functional by promoting and voting for good policies, staying involved at the local level, and generally acting as a participant in government rather than a subject of it. Playing John Galt and pretending that I'm just going to have my own safe little bitcoin world if our government fails, so I don't care and in fact assume that it WILL fail, would be both sickeningly cynical (regarding society's outcome) and naively optimistic (regarding my own outcome).
How would a world, realisticly speaking, look like if we ever reach a dystopian level where we all stop using the currencies of our own countries?
Srsly, if i stop trusting in the Euro, i can't imagine how our whole economy has to look like. I think we might have a lot of bigger issues at this point in time as bitcoin and probably not enough resources anymore to run bitcoin.
If ECDSA or SHA256 were shown to be weaker than believed, they can be substituted in the bitcoin codebase (given approval of all participants, which are incentivized to ensure the computational security of the protocol).
The energy is the barrier to prevent malicious parties from rewinding history. Fundamental, understood quantities in the universe is far better than the political whims of the party in charge.
What does hyperbitcoinization look like? This infographic video provides some introduction to what this could be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDlaOGA2ac (Bitcoin: Everything there is, divided by 21 million)
The endgame of HODL is a digital Fort Knox. Under the gold standard people didn’t actually exchange pieces of eight. They used paper money.
You’ll just get a new state which holds Bitcoin and issues debt based on Bitcoin in the form of promissory notes.
It’s pretty simple - just require taxes be paid in Bitcoin and use violence against those who don’t pay. Just like with other revolutionary wars, you pay generals with land and soldiers with the new currency (I.e. Bitcoin). Some of those generals will end up as a dictator or president depending on whether you are able to establish a democracy.
The state will be the ultimate HODLer just as it was with gold.
You could pick up a history book, and you would learn that gold was almost never used as currency because it was simply too rare, and too valuable for the amounts traded in normal commerce.
Rather, silver was the currency of choice in Europe and most of Asia, with lower-value denominations eventually showing up as coins made of less valuable metals.