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Comment by mbg721 | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't we just re-base the currency at that point?

That “just” is doing some very heavy lifting. That could potentially involve having to update almost every financial system worldwide given the US dollar’s position as a global reserve currency.

Yes, but I think a "new dollar" is more likely than the US putting up with million-dollar bills. I guess it's a tough call which one is more embarrassing.

If inflation averages 5% per year, a factor of 10^17 (what are the biggest USD notes actually in use?) is just over 800 years away, which is far enough that we might legitimately not have a moon any more let alone dollars.

If hyperinflation brings that date closer, the dollar will probably also stop being a global reserve. Or possibly: will be caused by it ceasing to be a global reserve.

The federal reserve aims for 2% a year, their adjustments just haven't been working.

> 800 years away, which is far enough that we might legitimately not have a moon any more

Wait, what? 800 years is absolute peanuts for the fate of orbital bodies. Wikipedia's Timeline of the Far Future estimates the demise of the moon in 7.59 billion years; still in orbit around the Earth (albeit a much higher one), it gets destabilized by the expanding sun and eventually swallowed by it, along with the Earth. If they aren't swallowed by the sun, they estimate 65 billion years before we lose the moon in one way or another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft

Even the unit of replication is a factory under human control with no novel AI, and which can only replicate with significant human oversight of already existing mining, processing, and manufacturing equipment, it doesn't take insane reproduction rates to disassemble the moon in 800 years.

That's like saying "5 years away is far enough that Mount Rushmore might be gone by then!" because we could nuke it if we wanted to. Why would we do that!? We like the moon being there! Do these examples really help illustrate how far away 800 years, or 5 years, are?

Lots of people want to build megastructures, and the moon is convenient material; I suspect that when the capabilities make it seem like a serious possibility, people will discover the problems and then do it anyway just like with almost all the other environmental issues to date that compete against economic interests.

However, the main point of the example is "800 years is too far ahead to plan for how much the US dollar might inflate" by way of demonstrating how extreme things can change. As far as I know, no fiat currency has existed that long, and only three country-like entities[0].

Mount Rushmore isn't likely to be targeted by nukes, but I strongly suspect that it is defended against vandals (politically motivated or otherwise) with dynamite (or similar categories of explosives) — that said, if you've always wanted to go and have not yet done so, you should, as I could've said much the same thing about the World Trade Centre 22 years and a fortnight ago.

(I wonder if a single unfriendly nuke on US soil would cause an economic shock? Normally the assumption would be what else might come with it).

[0] https://www.brainscape.com/academy/longest-lasting-empires-w...

I love how you're bringing the US dollar's reserve currency status into a hypothetical where the US Treasury is issuing million dollar denominations. We can assume that some other parts of the world's financial system will have required fixing first.

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