> continued attacks ... practically impossible I agree that continued attacks makes a complicated situation, given the cartel participants would probably hold

> continued attacks ... practically impossible I agree that continued attacks makes a complicated situation, given the cartel participants would probably hold a significant amount of coin and would risk devaluing themselves against some other currency (though in the end-game scenario, what other currency matters?). Let's imagine that the majority of domestic and international trade is conducted in Bitcoin, with maybe some alterations to the protocol to enable hundreds of thousands of transactions per second at essentially zero cost from the perspective of an individual actor (non-miner), even bursting up to tens of millions of transactions per second, somehow. Suppose then that two large governments, say the Unites States of America and the People's Republic of China, get into a little tiff about some boats hanging around the Taiwan Strait. Would these societies (in aggregate) prefer that their domestic and international trade be conducted in Bitcoin, or in a domestically-controlled currency? A cartel could lock out a set of accounts from the Bitcoin network. Perhaps only temporarily, but long enough to have serious effects. > power themselves off-grid through renewables That'd be cool, but I doubt that off-grid will ever reach the efficiency and scale that on-grid will provide, due to fluctuations in the power sources and the economies of scale. It's hard to make a currency choice by betting on that technology, especially as the calculation could swap as the technology changes.