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Comment by agorabinary | Hacker News Reader

Except when the rules result in say, Weimar.

Because bad rules can exist doesn't mean all rules are bad. Just because bad can laws exist doesn't mean all laws are bad. libertarians can't seem to understand this.

Well, sure. It would be pretty idiotic to suggest that every rule ever thought up was a good idea.

no but there's a pretty bad track record of currency collapse. Diocletian. Confederate States of America. Weimar. Yugoslavia. Argentina. Zimbabwe. Venezuela.

Edit: Looking at my list, I should have listed one for every alphabet Letter, instead of going chronologically.

considering the time spans and number of countries, that's not actually that bad. Sure, there have been many other less famous examples, but the thing is that hyperinflation and currency collapse is actually quite rare. A lot of bitcoin boosters seemed to be under the impression that it was both inevitable and frequent. Also, this list is strongly correlated with catastrophic economic/political problems, as opposed to countries that were rolling along just fine until a sudden monetary-policy mistake.

well, small catastophes aggregate themselves in centralized economies. I'll strongly suggest you read this (which I linked to above):

[0]http://www.overstock.com/Books-Movies-Music-Games/The-Mis-Be...

Financial losses and windfalls / catastrophes happen far more frequently than you'd expect.

Also, my list is subject to dnautic's memory bias. Those are the names that I remember. There are certainly more. There is no currency in the history of the world that has lasted forever.

Plumbing my memory, I can add another: Brazil

The cruzeiro was replaced by the "cruzeiro real" literally "real cruzeiro", as a hack to recover from poor fiscal policy resulting in hyperinflation. The cruzeiro real was then replaced by the 'real'.

Imagine things getting so bad that the government decides to rebrand its old currency as 'fake'.

But that's another example of a currency collapsing as a result of external (political) pressures. This was something that Bitcoin did all by itself.

The failure of one exchange is not a currency collapse.

I don't think there is any meaningful dichotomy between "external" and "internal" anything with regard to a currency. If an "external" asteroid hits a country and destroys all the users of a given currency, it goes to zero, but that is a meaningful measure of the value of the "internal" exchanges that are going on as valued in that currency.

You could start with Assignats...

It sounds like you're saying that having rules (as opposed to having no rules) is a good idea, but only if there is some mechanism that makes good rules more likely than bad rules.

That mechanism is called "liberal democracy". It's been fairly effective so far.

I don't think it has been that great.

Well, look at the alternatives.

I have. I think there are better ones.

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