The difference between cryptocurrencies and other commodities is that other commodities have intrinsic worth. You can drink milk, you can eat wheat. You can't do anything with cryptocurrency, it's just a long, meaningless number.

I’d elect for a suboptimal government over such mechanisms any day, which seems to be a global consensus when you observe the lack of volatility in reserve currency values.

So if the forked chain becomes accepted, then they have 1000 USD and 1 Eth, while you have 0 dollars and 0 Eth, and you're never going to make the mistake of trusting a cryptocurrency ever again.

What distinguishes one fiat from another is "do important people believe in it". There may come a day when that's true for cryptocurrencies, but that day is not today.

Further, I doubt it ever will come, because cryptocurrency's core scarcity hamstrings monetary policy. No competent government would ever accept such restrictions. This is a feature for cryptocurrency enthusiasts (digital gold bugs) but a huge shortcoming for everyone else.

But for those countries, it really seems like choosing Diem is the worst of both worlds. You're still pinned to the Dollar, you're still at the whim of unaccountable controlling stakeholders, and you have all the downsides of cryptocurrency on top of it. I struggle to think of a group outside of Facebook that Diem is at all good for, honestly.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/145722-what-really-backs-th...

a lot of people like that crypto isn't backed by a gov, but i'd like to believe that most people would agree that the government has some intrinsic worth.

FWIW, you're saying that while cryptocurrency stays on the blockchain it's not regulated. That's definitely not true in the US--people have gone to jail for not complying with financial regulation and reporting laws [1]--and is likely soon to be even less true [2].

[1]: https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

[2]: https://news.bitcoin.com/cryptocurrency-act-of-2020/

Q: Is this fundamentally different to having a suitcase full of cash?

... other than https://xkcd.com/538/ ?

Yes, government can't print bitcoin. If you store cash - in the long term you will lose buying power. If bitcoin gets adopted as a store of value - nobody will be able to print it at will.

Depends on the border.

As long as you declare the cash to the authorities, there are many borders you can cross with great flipping wads of cash. Some industries operate mostly on cash (restaurants, for example), and "suitcases full of cash" isn't just for mobsters and movie villains.

Maybe if we could use the inherent incalculability of the three-body problem as the basis for a cryptocurrency. You'd need to observe the universe to "find" astrocoins.

It would be Astrology on steroids.

Of course that leaves out verifiability, encryption, anonymous identity yet ownership.

What if you (somehow) knew both parts of the quantum uncertainty portions of a particle because you initiated the system. Then you could demonstrate ownership by being able to predict the location or the momentum at any time based on that.

But it would be fun to hold cryptocoins called Heisenbergs

But that is an actual physical particle.

...no? Diem/Libra is built on Cosmos, which is a proof-of-stake system, not a proof-of-work system. Validator nodes in a proof-of-stake system do not compete to work ever harder to mine the same resources.

There are a rather large number of such validator nodes (100+ at minimum), but that's also true of banks when you translate their Highly-Available mainframe stacks into equivalent Highly-Available commodity-PC stacks. (I.e. they're not spending any more electricity per tx than the ACH system is.)