I think we're more likely to see a Texas scenario in the US: the electricity becomes unreliable, but the money remains stable.

Users of USD or EUR worried about inflation and getting into Bitcoin are really worrying about the wrong kind of tail risk. Users of other non-hard currencies have more of a point.

Like yesterday, when Fedwire and ACH were offline for hours?

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/federal-res...

That didn’t affect 99.9+% of people, and is a far cry from the USD being “unusable”.

Congratulations on not needing to send a wire transfer or ACH during the outage. For anyone who was expecting to do that, it was literally unusable.

Your take is like claiming a major AWS outage didn’t happen because you personally didn’t get on the Internet that day.

The original comment was talking about USD not being usable, not ACH. Having to delay money transfers for a day does not make a currency unusable.

Most ACH transactions take 3+ business days to settle anyway since it's a batch processing system.

I use only USD and didn’t even know that happened, so it seems like a bad example.

How many people would have noticed, if not for the headlines?

Anyone trying to send money using ACH. Maybe that doesn’t include you, but many regular people use it on an everyday basis.

In my lifetime, if I were to compare 3 numbers - no. of hours there was no electricity (X), no. of hours there was no mobile data coverage so that I could continue doing transactions without electricity (Y) and no. of hours Fedwie/ACH was down (Z) which prevented me from bank transfers, I'd say X and Y and at least 2 orders of magnitude bigger than Z.

If Fed/ACH going down for a few hours bothers you a lot but electricity/mobile network reliability doesn't faze you, you must be living in a truly unique place.

My computers and network are powered by uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) which I highly recommend for every important system. I have a generator in case of extended outage, which I also highly recommend to everyone who is able to have one at home, regardless of whether you own a computer.

I personally have fiber, cable, and LTE feeding my home gateway. This might seem like overkill to non-tech folks, but I recommend it to anyone whose productivity/career is highly reliant on being online.

I realize this isn’t necessarily a typical home setup, but I also think most people are horribly unprepared for many potential situations.

This isn’t a claim that I have zero downtime at home. It’s only to say that if my Bitcoin node is offline then any hope of relying on fiat banking was abandoned much earlier.

> This isn’t a claim that I have zero downtime at home. It’s only to say that if my Bitcoin node is offline then any hope of relying on fiat banking was abandoned much earlier.

Even if I had a setup like yours, I'd give up on bitcoin before "fiat banking." You can't buy gas for your generator with bitcoin.

Yet.

I don’t mean this flippantly.

One of the cryptocurrency is going to win out for day-to-day usage; the question is which.

As Andreas likes to say: “email used to be a multi-step series of memorized commands from a green terminal in a University.

Now my Mom can do it with a touch of her finger.”

I believe we’ll get that in the near-ish future.

> One of the cryptocurrency is going to win out for day-to-day usage; the question is which.

I don't know why you're so confident about this? It's entirely feasible that none of them are ever usable for day-to-day transactions.

Personally, I haven't seen any evidence that Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) is ever going to enter the mainstream. Even if it did, I don't see any benefit to using it over USD for the vast majority of people.

Bitcoin can actually be quite resilient to that. Also the USD failing, doesn't necessarily mean a global world war. The US can go the way of the Soviet Union or the British Empire.

Can you elaborate on that please

Mismanaging themselves into irrelevance- see Texas power grid.

> What are the chances that in an environment where the USD is not usable, there is an available network and electricity that makes bitcoin usable?

The post you replied to said unstable or high inflation, not unusable. An unstable dollar will not instantly bring about the apocalypse, there are plenty of real life examples of unstable, high inflation currencies. The currencies took years to fully fail.

Not to mention, a few years of hyper-inflation don't even imply that the currency will fail.

In the 80s and 90s, Greek inflation was in the 15-20% range. Italy dropped to 5% more quickly but at the start of the 80s was in the 20% range.

In the 70s UK inflation was 10-20%.

that type of inflation is clearly bad for keeping cash, but not going to cause the collapse of civilisation. From about 73 - 80 US inflation was in the region of 10% per year.

What about usable but inconvenient? Most of the world is like that, Africa, China, India, for large transactions gold or the USD is inconvenient and dangerous. Venezuela, Argentina, are other examples closer to the US.

I don't think cactus2093 meant US / western world.

I get that I said USD, but the fundamental premise doesn't get that altered.

Bitcoin is heavily resource intensive. In an environment that is already resource pressed either due to political instability/natural disaster/inflation/whatever, what are the chances that the resources are going to be found that can actually operate bitcoin, and won't be better utilizied elsewhere?

You don't need to do mining in the disaster affected area. You need _someone_ to mine and to confirm transactions, but that can happen anywhere the world.

It might be available, but you might not be able to open a bank account for it. You can store cash of course, but that has a different set of problems.

Argentina?