[Porsche-O-Phile]

Have to disagree with you tabs - most dollar transactions these days are ones and zeroes themselves - electronic transfers. Paper currency is becoming very passé and is very inefficient. Furthermore regulators hate it (harder to track, tax and seize). Gold is nice as a convention but if the SHTF you'll find that gold is every bit as worthless as paper dollars unless you can perform dentistry with it or perhaps do a bit of electronic circuitry work with it - and both dentistry and electronics circuiting would be dubious trades in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic society of the sort you love to perpetually cheerlead for. Metals like brass and lead (in the proper portable, "rapid distribution" format) would be a lot more valuable. Ditto commodities like fresh water, agricultural products, fuel, generators, medicines, etc.

ALL currencies (including gold, barter goods or bitcoins) only have value if two or more people agree they do. Dollars have value as a matter of convention - as you point out they're accepted globally as the world's standard reserve currency - but that's only a convention (but important enough to go to war over a la Gulf War I - the real reason we had for shutting down Saddam Hussein - he was threatening to replace the USD for petrol transactions). Gold similarly has value only by convention - it has little practical use. As long as the world looks at the USD as better (or perhaps "less bad") than anything else we have little to fear. What's out there to challenge it and knock it off its perch right now? The euro? The yen? The yuan? I'd think we're pretty safe for the time being despite the idiocy of our elected officials and the fact that this dynamic precisely enables a lot of their reckless thinking ("we're America - we can get away with it!"). Even if the dollars-for-petrol system started to unravel tomorrow I suspect it would be quite a while before another currency really began to seriously threaten the USD's status. I suspect something like this might be Putin's long-term plan but he's got problems of his own right now (as does China) ironically due to their exposure to global petroleum market dynamics

I'm with Wayne - I like the idea of Bitcoin and I've almost pulled the trigger a few times myself but I've always ultimately chickened out at the last moment because I don't fully understand it (and like Wayne I'm a person of above-average intelligence with a high-quality technical education!)

I like the idea of a decentralized currency that is not subject to the wiles of greedy private bankers or unpredictable central bank policy shenanigans but it's just too geeky and hard to really understand - I can't help but think "what's the catch to all this?" or "what is everyone not seeing here?"