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Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

The difference is that the local monopoly on violence forces demand for their fiat on the people and organizations within their sphere of influence, explicitly and implicitly.

It remains to be seen if an entirely voluntary money can be a major player in the modern world.

Then again, raw fiat is a very new experiment as well. It's only been about 50 years since the US broke the pretense of the dollar being constrained by gold reserves. So from that context, bitcoin's 13 years doesn't actually seem that radically young, especially if compared to gold's 5000 years.

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If people (specifically, the police and soldiers) stopped believing in the local monopoly on violence, it wouldn't exist either. Historically, this is a thing that happens pretty often, every few decades.

Gold in coinage is only about 2700 years old, btw, not 5000, and that was really electrum. Gold, silver, or electrum by weight may go back significantly further.

Wasn't gold commonly used as money long before it was first struck as coins?

Coinage really just seems to be a technology improvement to make trade more efficient, because you can more quickly verify and count the units.

"Long before" and "commonly" is a matter of perspective. It was first struck as coins about 2700 years ago, and was definitely used as money in a few countries at least 300 years earlier, and possibly as much as 3000 years earlier. There is no evidence to suggest that it was in wide use as money until about 2200 years ago, only in a few places like the Mediterranean. Then again, maybe there wouldn't be, since not many places had writing.

> Historically, this is a thing that happens pretty often, every few decades

Historically, there have been civil wars that threaten government's monopoly on violence every few decades? :o

That surely isn't the experience in most stable countries or is it?

Well, by definition a stable country is one without a collapse every few decades!

It happens somewhere quite often, and the number of countries with 100-year uninterrupted continuity of government is shorter than you'd expect - basically the unoccupied Allies, Switzerland, and a few microstates.

I meant that it happens in a given country on average every few decades. I took a somewhat slapdash sample last year and the median time of last violent collapse of government was 01945, 76 years ago. On average it happens in a few countries every year.

Raw fiat is NOT a new experiment, the Yuan dynasty in China printed paper money in the 13th century, not backed by any precious metal or commodity. They printed too much and had inflation problems, so that's not a new problem either.

Ah, you are right. I knew that, but had forgotten. Thanks for the correction!

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