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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Are you serious ? What country is going to deliberately undermine their own existing currency by dedicating taxpayers dollars to mining a speculative currency used substantially for illegal activities. And in the process basically throw their own businesses and people under the bus.

I think you are frankly quite delusional if you think ANY government is going to do this.

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Probably, no state would do that directly, but what some state could do is too notice unstoppable spread of BTC in their territory for some reason (e.g. because of their own fiscal policies like in Argentina) and instead of waiting to become irrelevant, fight, lose all karma and all funding, could develop a guideline to save the face and satisfy greedy interests of the officials. They can do a "special economic zone" or simply develop simple regulation and taxation terms. If they aren't going to stop that thing, they can profit off it over some extended period of time instead of fighting and quickly losing everything.

Of course, it all depends on actual power structures and level of psychopathy. Good thing, Bitcoin does not care. If there's a fight against it, it'll only slow things down, not stop the process completely.

I do think that countries not satisfied with the current status quo (e.g. USD having a dominant role) could embrace Bitcoin. Obviously, it will tend to be smaller or with less stable currencies, but that is simply where you start.

Converting to a cryptocurrency could be a viable alternative to "dollarization" or other end-games when nations have currency crises.

Unless you're a country bound to a currency controlled by another nation.

Say the Euro collapses. There are many countries who may suddenly decide it makes sense to switch to a new currency. Some may consider BitCoin. In the historical case of Europe, this is unlikely, but it could happen elsewhere.

BitCoin might be a harbor in the face of runaway inflation. Even the swings of BitCoin pale in comparison to periods of massive inflation in several countries.

> BitCoin might be a harbor in the face of runaway inflation. Even the swings of BitCoin pale in comparison to periods of massive inflation in several countries.

It might be, but there's no inflation on the horizon anywhere. The Euro is edging ever closer to deflation.

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