why do u think it wouldn't fx well as a reserve currency? nightly settlements btwn nations could occur in an instant unlike gold an no centralized warehouses for bullion would be needed.
Several reasons:
1) I do not consider Bitcoin to be reliable under what most people consider 'success'. I do not trust that the infrastructure needed to support the solution under heavy usage worldwide will be maintainable under coordinated attack.
2) A beauty (in my opinion) of Bitcoin is that it operates at the pleasure of the user base....but user bases can be fickle.
take a look at this:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=78403.msg874553#msg874553Looks like Gavin is saying that 'they' could retro-actively code up something which I've previously argued should be put in place and tested and ready to go pro-actively (namely, user-optional black lists.)
But I'm not even talking about 51%-type attacks in my comments. What I am referencing is that significant network bandwidth and a fairly complex 'supernode' arrangement will be needed for
transmission if/when Bitcoin gets big. Both such solutions would be, in my opinion, challenging to maintain in the event of a coordinated attack by the various corp/gov entities which will probably always have their hands on the levers of the global infrastructure.