Quote from: pbateman1 on Today at 08:11:49 AM

The real question is whether or not world governments would allow for such a scenario. Kleptocracy is more common than one might think, and sometimes comes in tandem with plutocracy. What's unique about the most powerful government, the United States, is that it is a very different form of kleptocracy than history has ever seen. Look at every store of value/means of transacting and we see that governments have always seized the predominant technology for this at one point or another. Think the 1930s, the US gov't seized mass amount of gold and silver, also Prodrazvyorstka in the Soviet Union.

In theory BTC could exist without fiat, but then government would lose control. Unless they owned a 51% interest in mining that is, which is technically feasible given the resources available although not likely because they know what would happen in that case.

Technologically speaking, BTC would be better off as an underlying store of value for a much speedier system layered on top. Kind of how gold backed the paper dollar, even though most of it was in vaults in New York/Kentucky, not in hand. BTC is digitally "heavy", just how gold is physically heavy and not easily moved en masse. The problem is, that requires trusting a third party. So someone would have to come up with a trustless way to implement that scenario. Ideally, this system would be cryptographically secure, but so speedy that the security of payment is as fast as a Visa transaction, or even better, like me handing you cash.

Financially speaking, Bitcoin would have to reach such maturity that the price of goods in BTC would not wildly fluctuate on a regular basis. We see this over long periods of time in fiat, which is kind of like a frog in boiling water effect. Somehow it all works out though because in real terms nobody is paying that much more for goods. Overnight price swings of 10% like we regularly see would not be acceptable in a crypto-only world though. I think we can get to this point once society as a whole realizes that instead of trusting that governments honor their obligations we could just hand that duty over to immutable mathematics and algorithms.

So the answer is yes. But would it be allowed?

It is never going to be allowed, bitcoin will keep on existing and it will become incredibly popular as there is nothing governments can do to stop the adoption of bitcoin, but fiat currencies will always exist, governments get a lot of power from those currencies to just let them disappear without a fight as they can steal from the wealth of their citizens through inflation, so I doubt they will ever admit their defeat against bitcoin officially and will keep trying to deceive anyone that they can with those useless currencies.