Exactly. The Mozilla folks have no idea how foolish they are being about this. They have just rendered their browser a "legacy app" on the corporate desktop. It makes it very problematic for Linux desktops, as they can't simply switch to IEx. It may not affect their market share right away, but in the long term it renders Linux desktops an unsellable propositions.

Because something you hoard permanently has no use to you. At least gold and silver can be made into jewellery and silverware. Not so bitcoins. Can't see myself drinking a glass of wine out of one. Until you use a bitcoin for something it is dead

Trade it for about a dozen fresh eggs, more like. Why the assumption that only rotten eggs would be available if the currency itself had rotted? Two different things.

I think they might if they were being paid in gold or silver. I know in gold terms I am making the same now as I made when I left collage, but I have a much higher skill level.

Hmm. So post civil-war US, with a long period of deflation, was very bad for the US economy? No, that is what got America from being a backwards third-world land of hill farmers to the great industrial power it became by 1900. Did hard money do Britain any harm? No, the industrial revolution started there, with gold and silver in circulation as money and two centuries of prices trending down. Small amounts of inflation are harmful too, just not as much as big inflation.

It is still a substantial transfer of wealth from the real economy to holders of new money who have not had to make anything in exchange for it. It also discourages real savings, which are necessary for real investments. For example, look at the greatest phase of American growth. All of it under either a silver standard or a gold standard. All of it with falling prices. Same with the industrial revolution in Britain, with gold guineas and silver shillings. Same with Rome and silver denarii. History is also littered with examples of empires that have declined as they debased their currency - Rome later on 20th Century Britain, and America today. Only really the Russians managed to build a great empire while having nonsense money under communism.

Just to be pedantic: the Thaler was first minted in Joachimsthal, Bohemia, in 1518. A Thaler is called a dollar in Spanish, and the Spanish version of this coin, minted in the Spanish empire's silver mining colonies in America, were the first American currency. A US dollar was a Spanish dollar of the same size and weight minted in the US much later - 1858 I think.I guess there might have been a few US ones minted before that, but the Spanish one was the "real" one for a very long time and was in main circulation. Arguable what is called a US dollar today is not, from the point when they went onto the gold standard with $5 quarter ounce gold coins, and the paper dollar since 1934. Dollars are supposed to be silver.

Not true. There is no point in collecting taxes in dollars unless the government can buy with them. If the US government has to chose between keeping to the current US legal tender laws or effectively abolishing all taxes in real terms, they will forget the US dollar overnight. That is what happened in Zimbabwe.

If they can make it as scarce and unfalsifiable and liquid as silver or gold, they are in with a chance. But I doubt it. Use of something as a means of exchange normally follows from its use as a desirable commodity. It doesn't just become desirable by being in limited supply. False scarcity like this as a failure rate of 100% in the long term. Too tempting to fiddle it ultimately, whereas going and panning in the river or shovelling dirt for mining is really difficult and unfiddleable.

That is called chartellism and it is unfortunately a fallacy. If the government creates enough money to make it valueless but demanded tax payments in it, then all a government would succeed in doing is abolishing all taxes. The use of a currency for tax collection follows from its use as a means of exchange, rather than causing it.

But if they make enough new dollars it will be very easy to pay any amount of tax and still not have transferred any real value to the government. Currencies are used because they are a medium of exchange in business. Not because you have to pay taxes in a particular one. That follows from their use as a medium of exchange - if the government couldn't exchange them for real goods, the money would be no use to them.

Nah. It doesn't matter what currency a commodity is traded in. They are all substitutes for one another at current exchange rates. A lot of prices are quoted in US dollars out of convention, but that doesn't mean people are really keeping a bit stock for real use. I've seen that in the Middle East a lot - businesses quoting in dollars but settling in the local currency.

If you really believe gold and silver would be worthless in those circumstance you want your head examined. Just open a book about past inflationary collapse. Hell, even youtube as stuff from Zimbabwe from two years ago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ubJp6rmUYM

If you need paper dollars you can just sell your gold or silver. Gradually people will start accepting gold and silver directly though. It is the way these things always go.

Because it is another paper obligation, and similarly unreliable in the long term.