The difference is this would require a hard fork, and the value of this fork would be determined entirely by market forces. Imagine if when the US decided to 'p

The difference is this would require a hard fork, and the value of this fork would be determined entirely by market forces. Imagine if when the US decided to 'print' a few trillion bucks, it resulted in the creation of a new USD2 currency. And you were free to keep using USD1 or swap over to USD2. More or less the exact same thing has already happened with Bitcoin multiple times, with the outcome you could expect. It's quite interesting in an economic sense too because, unlike our USD2 analogy, in the Bitcoin world users actually keep all their money in both forks (so if you have $1000 in USD, you'd also have $1000 in USD2) yet disproportionately favor one currency to the point that e.g. Bitcoin Cash is worth $217 per coin, while BTC mainline is worth $26,000 per coin.