I'm not sure what you mean by this. "if we all decided dollars were worthless" does a lot of heavy lifting Consider the following scenario: If everyone excep

I'm not sure what you mean by this. "if we all decided dollars were worthless" does a lot of heavy lifting Consider the following scenario: If everyone except one person decided that dollars were worthless then on day one everyone would think that the one person accepting money must be insanely stupid. That person now has all the worthless money. Turns out, money is created through contractual obligations that mandate the acceptance of money in equal amount to the created quantity. Everyone is now indebted to that person. People who can't fulfill their contractual obligations must go and declare insolvency. The person with all the money offers a single dollar for all the assets that this person owns, since that person owns all the money, there isn't a second dollar to go around to compete with him. After spending his first dollar, the economy now has one dollar representing the entire worth of the economy. The next insolvency will be auctioned off for two dollars, four dollars and so on. What I'm getting at here is that "if we all decided that dollars were worthless" implies the abandonment of the rule of law, which makes the statement significantly less interesting. You can do a lot of things in a failed state. Abandoning the currency is one of the least interesting ones.