IMHO, even if whole banking system will be replaced with bitcoin, interest based economy will be built on top of it and same instruments will be built with similar level of issues
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
Just look at what happened to Greece, they cant control their fiscal policy and they have been stuck in the mud for 20 years. The same will happen to the world as a whole
Who do you think controls Greece’s fiscal policy? (Before you answer, consider, what does “fiscal policy” refer to, and how is it different from “monetary policy”?)
This is simply the case because our economic system is based around the idea that someone will punish those who do not play by the rules of this system, otherwise we would not even have any kind of financial system to speak off.
Money is only worth something because of the rule of law, and the rule of law is only worth something because (central) authorities have the means the enforce the law (usually thanks to the monopoly on violence/imprisonment).
Although I agree with your point, a large imposing centralized force will ultimately lead to a controlling singular entity over time in such a system. But won't go sk far to say thats the way it has to be.
Then the US gov would have the ability to control the circulating supply of BTC.
Think of it this way, BTC caps out, then the US gov HODLed 50% of all BTC for an uncertain amount of time (call it a decade). The rest of the world starts to take risks accordingly and make investment strategies based on “no possible inflation, because BTC”.
After a decade+ of BTC HODL policy the US gov decides to release 5% it wouldn’t be “printing BTC” but it would still certainly be “quantitative easing” and the extra supply of BTC would result in very much the same inflation as we see today.
There is no scenario where the largest governments of the world cannot directly control the supply of circulating money! (Which is the only money that really matters).
You know, like they already do with this whole "fiat money" thing.
Nail on the head!
The only difference between "tokens" and "currency" is an army and taxes!
Countries don't all use their own currencies (and I don't just mean the Euro zone, this also happens with USD and used to happen with GBP), but they do all have their own taxes. Some countries don't have any armed forces unless you count the police. And the force of law is enough of a threat to get people to hand over crypto keys when they're physically in the relevant jurisdictions and the law enforcement makes that demand.
Sure. I think this missed the point.
I didn't say/intend "a country / army needs to be backed by a unique currency"
I said, "For a token to be a currency, it needs to be backed by [at least one] army and [at least one country's] taxes".
e.g. The Euro happens to be backed by multi armies and at least Germany's taxes.
> Some countries don't have any armed forces unless you count the police.
Again, it isn't "their army" but it is "an army". e.g. Liechtenstein is backed by "Austria and Switzerland under an informal agreement among the three countries." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_arme...
Anyways, if we disagree that is ok too. All of this is quite fuzzy really.
What is the minimum number of natural persons required to fork Bitcoin to a larger supply? I’d wager it’s a number smaller than half of the Congress plus the President.
You would have to somehow take down the vast majority of nodes, many of which run on Tor.
Notably, neither miners alone nor the core Bitcoin devs could force an increase in supply without the support of the majority of nodes.
Note also, you can run a node on a Raspberry Pi so most node operators are regular folks securing the network for themselves. Bitcoin is run/secured by plebs, not whales.
In the Blockwars of 2017 many large miners and custodial exchanges tried to increase the block size but were thwarted because the majority of nodes didn’t agree with the change.
I think the 21 million cap is safe for the foreseeable future. If anything we may see a switch to Satoshis (Sats) as the default currency to replace Bitcoin. There are 1 Billion Sats per Bitcoin which should be more than enough for some time.
That said, it would be a fork, responsible for producing its own hash power, and would not be recognized as Bitcoin since it wouldn’t be following the Bitcoin protocol.
If you wanted to modify the Bitcoin protocol to support a larger supply, see my previous comment.