>>if an entrepreneur can invent their own money and subsume the one issued by a government then you don't have a government. I for one prefer having a government.

Nonsense. We've had non-political money before. During the free banking era we had thousands of bank-issued currencies that competed in an open market, and the state was alive and well.

The state exists as long as it has a monopoly on force within its jurisdiction. It doesn't need to monopolize the control of money and imprison anyone who has wrong-think about what they consider to be money.

I understand that a lot of people here don't like cryptocurrency and the get-rich mentality around it, but understand that when you call for laws to prohibit various uses of it, you're calling for people to see the inside of a prison cell because they have different ideas about what money is than you.

Thank you! Only those with a short memory equate money exclusively with government.

So wait, okay, in the 1800s state-and-gold-backed banks issued legal tender in lieu of anything else, this is a fair analogy to cryptocurrency and anybody against cryptocurrency just wants to see people in jail

>Legal tender is perhaps the most important corner stone of a modern nation state, if an entrepreneur can invent their own money and subsume the one issued by a government then you don't have a government.

Legal-tender laws already prevent non-government currencies from subsuming fiat. Nobody is obliged to accept Bitcoin as payment of a debt, but they are obliged to accept legal tender.

And besides that, there will always be demand for fiat at least for paying taxes.

Firstly, I don't think it's likely a cryptocoin is going to destroy any major currency.

I don't agree having a non government issued currency means you don't have a government, for one there seem to be a few countries that use the Dollar or Euro as the de-facto currency.

When they allow a foreign currency to become the de-facto medium of exchange in a nation, the government is basically admitting that it's lost the ability to issue currency and manage its own economy. The loss of economic control involved is so extreme that you'd only do it if you had essentially no other options left - the government is close to failure.

Not necessarily. Government can delegate things up or down - the Euro is not an effect of Germany, the UK or France admitting economic defeat but a realization that a shared economy can benefit all.

Yes, but that's very different - the Eurozone countries are not allowing another nation's currency to become their defacto currency, they're creating a pooled economy where they all still have a voice in the management of the common currency. (And it's still causing a ton of problems, when you consider what's happened in Spain, Italy and Greece.)

It's radically different from allowing your defacto currency to be one managed by another country, particuarly one that has no common economic interest with yours.

There's an exception to that: most European microstates adopted the Euro but aren't part of the Eurozone (nor the EU) and have no power in decisions made about it. Of course I concede that microstates have unique properties that break away from most considerations that are applicable to "typical" sovereign nations but it's not as clear-cut as you describe.

I'd argue this isn't inconsistent; these states are so small they effectively have ceded control of their economy, as well as their national defense, to the larger European community. Kosovo and Montenegro, for example, previously used the German Mark. This seems pretty close to an admission that for whatever reason (scale, stability) they're not able to issue their own currency in a credible manner.

Good point, what about the Euro?

See my other comment, but TLDR it's not a foreign currency if you're a Eurozone country.

Does it really change that much though? I suppose they would not be able to control inflation, but taxes and tariffs would remain the same. It's not a total loss of control.

This sounds like trumps if you don't have a border you don't have a country.

Having alternative currencies doesn't obviate all the benefits of organized representation.

It does not even replace the nation currency unless you think that the national currency is so defective that citizens will collectively choose coins.