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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

> Most were concerned about keeping the dominance of the USD long term on the global financial system.

I’ve found being the best product on the market to be the best way of ensuring one’s dominance.

In that case BTC will never rise to the top.

That's not a very helpful thing to say. Most of the obvious explanations for why BTC supposedly isn't good are easily debunked (and have been a thousand times already). It would be more helpful to give a specific criticism of BTC that is actually interesting (i.e., cannot be correctly dismissed in two sentences).

I have too much faith in humanity to believe that the thing which beats out every other clearinghouse over sufficiently long timescales will be “dedicate unimaginable amounts of compute to find one meaningless number and in doing so commit 1Mb of data every 10 minutes (slower than ancient dial-up connections)”.

I clearly don’t know what that better thing will be (I have some vague ideas…), but still I can’t convince myself that Bitcoin will ever be humanity’s best-engineered clearinghouse.

Bitcoin is like the "http://" of cryptocurrency. Public balances, public transactions. We need that little "s" on the end. Taproot doesn't come anywhere close. Monero and PirateChain are the leading "https://" contenders, in my opinion. There is lots of competition in the privacy coin space so everyone will have different opinions here.

Also, guns.

Nah being the only product for which you can pay in taxes, at pain of men with guns putting you in a tiny box, is the best of ensuring dominance. Over the domestic population, at least.

This is a folk rationale but it doesn't hold much water. If you look at countries with weak currencies, being the currency that taxes are paid in or that the people with the guns are telling you to use, doesn't ensure a stable currency at all. Quite the reverse in fact, the need to threaten people into using a country's currency indicates severe weakness.

Stability and (domestic) dominance are two different things.

This is a silly argument considering the widespread adoption of the USD for international trade, well beyond the oil industry.

You're right, if I held all Euros which are used in something like 33% of worldwide forex trades, then everything would be dandy and the government wouldn't mind at all that I wasn't paying in dollars. That's why every American has lots of Euros.

The dollar isn't better managed than all the other currencies. It's a network effect of debt denominated in USD, one of the most relevant of which is that taxes for about 25% of global GDP is paid in dollars.

If you need dollars, you can exchange your euros for dollars seconds before paying whatever.

If the government had a problem with that, something drastic would've changed.

You can speculate that the US will deteriorate into a state where there will be currency controls and stuff, but in our lifetimes, it hasn't been like that.

People say, or used to say, a lot, that oil being denominated in dollars meant something. I mean, that the choice of units has great economic value, somehow. But nobody's denying that you can exchange one currency for another at any time, right?

More like a product that isn't highly volatile, has FDIC backing to cover losses and whose direction isn't controlled by a handful of private individuals who control the mining and set the direction of the underlying software.

How do I file a claim with FDIC to cover the inflationary losses of my USD currency?

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