That's okay. Eisenhower broke them over the 1956 Suez Crisis. The UK, in particular, was taught a hard lesson about its new role in the world.

Interestingly, the major point of leverage against the UK was their debt held by the US government. Ike threatened to dump their debt, which would have destroyed their currency.

Which is why god invented passport cards. I never use my driver's license as an ID for precisely this reason.

So, around 10^32 kelvin?

We might be able to work with that, in principle...

You mean like this cyclic rat plague? If so, then no, I missed the last one and the next one isn't due for another 30-40 years.

I don't know if I can commit to that. I mean, I'm trying to taper off, but setting fixed targets just stresses me out.

As long as you believe in fairy tale technology like microstamping, why not just require every crime lab have a CSI-type "enhancing" microscope? That way you could code a GUI in Visual Basic and then have the computer tell you who committed the crime.

For those who are uninformed, read about how cartridge microstamping (doesn't) work in practice, and even if it *did* work, think about how trivial it is to defeat. The microstamping system is supposed to use a rather weak force to stamp a tiny serial number? Nope, I can't see how that could ever be trivially defeated, even if it *did* work in the first place.

So, you mean to say that the negative reciprocal of the risk of nonextinction is rapidly diminishing?

You worded that confusingly. Did you mean to say, "the risk we won't not be extinct is not diminishing?"

If that's true, then "WTF, Pirate Party?"

Don't be autistic. Yes, technically the value of these hyperinflating currencies is infinitesimally above zero. That does not count as "keeping value" when practically speaking it takes wheelbarrows full of currency notes to buy a loaf of bread.

So, no, you're wrong. History has repeatedly shown that simply having a government insist on taxation in the form of a currency they issue is an insufficient backstop for value in the face of loss of confidence in the populace.

People aren't stupid: they exit the currency in favor of other, more stable stores of value (other currencies, land, tampons, whatever), get paid in kind, or simply resort to barter. They convert into the worthless government currency later to pay taxes. They don't ride the sinking ship.

You posed the question incorrectly.

What we're saying is that US laws mandating the value of the USD are only worth as much as people believe. There were laws mandating the value of the Mark in the Weimar Republic. There are laws mandating the value of the Zimbabwean Dollar. Obviously, those laws weren't/aren't sufficient to make people trust the currency and they collapsed.

Now, asking whether people *should* find the BTC to be as trustworthy as the USD is an appropriate question. The answer to that is obviously "no".

What we take issue with is the perspective that there is some divine providence conferred on national currencies that make them trustworthy, when clearly there is no such intrinsic property like that.

So what you're saying is that the federal government refuses to abide by the Constitution. Okay, I agree that is what they do. Your argument is that we will get them to stop breaking the rules by making a rule that says that they can't break the rules?

The federal government has been wiping its ass with the Constitution ever since FDR. Trying to constrain or restrain the federal government via written law is a fool's errand.

Hm, I wouldn't. I'd auction off the hardware, then I would invest half of the proceeds in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities...

...or just place a permanent freeze on your credit, like I did a decade ago. When you want to apply for credit you temporarily lift the freeze for a few days whereupon it reverts to frozen. It works much like making your Bluetooth device discoverable.

Exactly. How many of these pedants would have their mind blown when they consider that use tax is supposed to be paid based on tax jurisdiction they are in. Okay, perhaps that's not mind blowing, but now consider you bought a pizza and are eating it while driving in a car passing through various tax jurisdictions while doing so. What counts as "putting to use" in terms of eating pizza? Chewing, digesting, extracting the food energy for biological processes? If it's the last one, what happens when the pizza is vomited out in a different jurisdiction? Does one apply for a tax credit?

Uh oh, our sales/use tax system has boundary conditions! Therefore sales tax is completely inviable! Herp derp.

The odometer approach is a good, workable idea.