If by that you mean adopting the euro, then yes, that was an improvement over what came before. Using something like BTC would have been a much greater improvement, but having a single fiat currency was still an improvement over having many little fiefdoms. And tying the parachutes together is not a good analogy. Printing money is a bad idea, and printing money unilaterally is the only thing the national governments gave up. Cyprus could not have saved itself by printing money. The Cypriots could easily have implemented good banking oversight had they wanted to. Preferably by leaving it to the market, but even if the government did it and had done a decent job. This by itself would have prevented the problem, regardless of what the ECB did.