I was in a bank yesterday and there were all these animals in cages shuffling paper around, worried that their customers would yell at them if they were off by

I was in a bank yesterday and there were all these animals in cages shuffling paper around, worried that their customers would yell at them if they were off by a single digit, (because doing so would be tantamount to robbing the customer of their hard work) and it struck me that all that the shuffling accomplishes is moving tokens of value around, mere accounting entries. And it doesn't even do that well! It's breathtakingly inefficient. For instance, one can't tell how many shoes are sold in a country.. that would require a totally different, feet-on-the-ground statistical survey, or an industry association (voluntary reporting). We can't tell who's doing what at all. We're like the suckers in The Wire Season 1 (which seems so quaint by today's standards) trying to reverse-engineer IRL networks. The hacker solution would be so much more elegant, so much less messy (no meatspace!). It's like your example of hackers in dorms doing voip way before Skype. No self-respecting hacker could (even on the wildest bender) have come up with pushing pieces of paper around as value-tokens. What a hacker cooks up today is what the world will use in the next decade. With bitcoin, unravelling a network is trivial. Bust one node (a snitch or an undercover sting op) and the rest unravel. The combination of government and hackers sits somewhat oddly in my mind. So I shall refrain from pursuing that line of thought. However, in this spirit of prognostication, I like possibility #4. But you understate the case. It's not about USD vs RMB, it's about fractional-banking vs fixed-quantity money. If #4 is the case, some might argue that USG must have pre-mined a bunch of coins (and conversely, that if they didn't, #4 is not the right answer). This need not hold, of course. One can make some predictions if #4 is indeed the case: with bitcoin, taxation is easy and automatic. Smaller governments would result (State, Local & Federal), deficit spending would end, the free-market would still work, but command-and-control would be much easier. edit: I see I'm largely of the same opinion as user guylhem.