I have no idea about Somalia and their money-printing operations. I also have no desire to purchase anything from that country, or visit it. I certainly wouldn'

I have no idea about Somalia and their money-printing operations. I also have no desire to purchase anything from that country, or visit it. I certainly wouldn't want to buy their currency as an investment if it can be printed by anyone, or some army can come in and make those notes illegal, or the country has no economic development to make the demand for those notes increase over time. So what's backing that currency is a number of things, with "backing" being a synonym for "making it valuable or useful in the long term to buy things from and in Somalia." Having a country be physically protected from invasion being a large factor in that equation. Also, not only an army, but more importantly a naval force that can protect trade routes from pirates (doesn't Somalia have its own fleet of pirate ships?? lol.) The other thing to evaluate in a currency is the amount of it held by foreign countries. If all of a sudden China were to dump its US dollars, I'm sure the value would go down (but what would they buy instead?) Yet at the same time, China has an interest seeing the US survive and/or thrive to a certain extent so those dollars remain valuable and/or useful. In fact, it seems the Chinese are going crazy about Bitcoins and Litecoins and it makes more sense for many to hold them than US dollars.. possibly because it allows them to make their funds available offshore and also pay bills locally. As a side note, I've heard the Chinese have official printing plates for US dollars... another indicator about how important ubiquity is, in contrast to artificial scarcity to back a currency. If there's a lesson to be learnt about bitcoin, I think it's that artifical scarcity can also alienate a lot of people (even if it motivates bitcoin holders) and drive up the value of other crypto currencies, and if it was distributed more evenly from the outset, if today's reality would be any different. So my prediction is that there'll be a number of competing and complimentaty crypto currencies emerging supported by groups that were early adopters (or buyers) of them. If I were a fortune 100 company, it might make more sense to buy up say Litecoins on the cheap now, and then take payments in them later. (a bit off-topic, but useful to think about).. why give a free-ride to bitcoin holders? (unless the top execs are holding them.. or more likely, they'll be buying Litecoins now, esp Chinese ones)