Bitcoin can't be printed. It can't be faked. A record of all transactions is public. It crosses borders easily and doesn't require a vault. It is the perfect settlement for central banking transactions. The BIS created SDRs to fill this role. Bitcoin might be that replacement. What is needed is liquidity. An exchange in each country with a currency. Wealth translators to efficiently exchange Bitcoin for any other value, including gold. To bind these currencies together a common language is also needed: Promise Language. http://promiselanguage.blogspot.com
LOL, you think the US government is going to sit back and give up their world reserve status..... Now that's funny
If it happens it would only happen if we had some kind of currency collapse. I think its very unlikely bitcoin would ever be the worlds reserve currency. (but if it was...I think we would see bitcoins selling for multi-millions of dollars each!)
The US government is composed of individual people acting in their own self interest. Those people don't like being ripped off and need a store of value of safety. The US government does hold gold and eventually will see Bitcoin as an alternative to gold. Bitcoin has advantages of not requiring a vault and it can be transferred easily. The BIS created SDRs as a currency to clear transactions between countries. Bitcoin serves that purpose better and more efficiently. IE. it is in the central banks' personal interest to accept Bitcoin as settlement. Also.. Bitcoin is not a threat to the dollar. It serves the purpose of a stable store of wealth. Unfortunately, even the people who work at central banks don't really understand monetary science. They'll figure it out eventually. What's needed is efficiency in value/wealth translation. A common protocol does that.
It is highly doubtful that things will ever be priced in Bitcoin. Pricing will likely always be done in dollars. Bitcoin will float freely to translate value amongst different currencies.
What about all the paper money that can vanish from banks? "Some 650 banks failed in 1929; the number would rise to more than 1,300 the following year." If you don't think that this can ever happen again or even on a larger scale, you are fooling yourself. I trust my own crypto currency cold storage that can't be hacked more than I trust a bank who only keeps small fractions of actual cash on hand. Yeah that's right, I'm one of the Crazies! I would even wager that tinfoil does better than the USD in the long run
I agree, the options for safe wallet storage are limited. Hopefully a few startups might solve that problem.
The only people that get hacked are people that did stupid stuff to get hacked. Usually they would do something stupid like download something they shouldn't have off pirate bay, or they go to youtube and search for bitcoin hacks thinking they are going to get some tutorial on how to steal bitcoins and they get theirs stolen instead, or they put their wallet.dat in their dropbox. Whenever you talk to the people that got hacked and really get down to it 99.999% of the time its their fault somehow.