Governments all believe that the supply of money must be managed for the sake of the economy. This might be true, but any currency built on this belief will be valued lower than a fixed-supply currency.
It's hard to create and distribute a new currency, and convince people that it's worth something. Bitcoin has done that, and it will be hard for even governments to convince people that there's a better option.
It is extremely easy for a government to convince people to use their new currency, they already do it just by enforcing tax payments be paid in their local fiat currencies.
1. Bills are introduced every session in just about every state for any crazy thing you can think of. And most of them die a quiet death, because they never had a chance to begin with.
2. States don't have their own currencies, so other than the ease of use of US Dollars, they really wouldn't care what you pay your taxes in, so long as they can use it.
That's true but not very meaningful. Imagine the difference if only US citizens would take USD (and only so much of it) instead of it generally being preferred world-wide.
So yes, a government could set up an e-currency and make us use it, but there's no way a government could (intentionally) set up a currency like bitcoin. Truly algorithmic e-currency is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of governing. Anything by a government would allow reversals, currency injections, invisible transactions, etc.
Give an example. The fiat currencies that people actually save in have a direct lineage from gold, or are linked to such a currency by monetary policy. Tax value alone has never given a new currency stable value.
> The fiat currencies that people actually save in have a direct lineage from gold
(1) What difference does "direct lineage" have? They aren't gold, and they aren't backed by gold. Unless you arguing that they have sentimental value from a historical association that hasn't been real for generations, this is meaningless.
(2) Also, this is more true of silver than it is of gold. the gold standard was sort of a brief fad (in long-term historical terms) in the final centuries of commodity currency standards as the dominant model, while silver had dominated for a much longer time previously. Pretty much all of the extant currencies that have a "direct lineage from gold" also have a direct lineage from silver, and the ones that aren't themselves relatively new have a much longer history under silver.
The direct lineage matters because my point was that it's hard to convince people that a new currency is worth something. It's easy if you promise to redeem it for something people already value.
> It's hard to create and distribute a new currency, and convince people that it's worth something.
I don't buy this premise. Lots of online games have also done this. They do this by finding a target audience and hooking them in, and then saying "If you want more you have to pay."
BitCoin just targeted libertarians. People have made other BitCoin forks for other audiences. Granted none of them took off like BitCoin, but that's because they were all pretty much jokes targeted at a small niche.
Bitcoin's political alignments are a distraction and I encourage you to ignore them if your goal is to understand what's happening in the world.
No one buys game currencies to hold. They buy them to spend. If you don't understand why people are excited about Bitcoin, you should go find out. It's a trustless database in the sky, and that sort of thing wasn't possible before 2009. New technologies make old analogies misleading.
This is actually not true. But I'm not going to get into it since you don't think BitCoin's political alignments are relevant, and you are talking down to me at the same time.
It's hard to create and distribute a new currency, and convince people that it's worth something. Bitcoin has done that, and it will be hard for even governments to convince people that there's a better option.