The scenario I'm thinking about is the one that superkuh brings up above: > The USA could be gone and bitcoin would still work. An event that caused the USA t

The scenario I'm thinking about is the one that superkuh brings up above: > The USA could be gone and bitcoin would still work. An event that caused the USA to dissolve would likely signal a network disruption on such a level that satellite access or maintenance could not be guaranteed and that global Internet access might feasibly be partitioned or disrupted (or could fail completely given the amount of international cooperation involved in maintaining the Internet). In addition to potentially breaking access to the network (or damaging the network to such a high degree that it ceased to be a global network), a disruption of that scale could also basically break mining given the amount of mining that is localized within the US. Or substitute China if you want. It's not clear to me that Blockstream's satellites or general satellite Internet would be sufficient for mining pools even if they were sufficient for signaling transactions to the Internet. ---- On a less catastrophic level, power also becomes a problem. I mentioned Gaza above, which currently has extremely limited access to electricity. It is hard to imagine maintaining a mining pool or securing transactions in that environment. Satellite connections do obviously help with access in those limited situations, but people in those situations are relying on the majority of the mining pool and the network being centralized in stable locations with stable governments. In which case, I would question the currency's independence or reliability as a fallback currency during global financial collapse -- an event that would destabilize not just individual small pockets of users but the actual network itself. ---- It is definitely true that the scenario is unlikely, but if Bitcoin is being sold by people like superkuh as if it is a disaster-proof security that could survive global financial collapse or the elimination of the USA... I don't think it would survive that. To be fair, that's not necessarily the thing that makes it a bad currency though, you're right to point that out. The reliance on connectivity does make it a bad currency but not because I'm worried about the Internet vanishing, more because the reliance on global consensus makes it slow and inconvenient to use for everyday transactions. The disaster stuff is largely just an imagined scenario and there's no reason why a "good" currency needs to be disaster-proof in order to be useful. But if that imagined scenario is being used as a selling point for the coin (which I think superkuh was doing), that's when I start to take issue with it.