Bitcoin Forum

What do you think? Is it possible for Bitcoin to get accepted as a national currency for any real country? It would be definitely amazing, but I'm sad that governments are scared of Bitcoin, because they can't track it like the banks they own. I heard about "mini-country" ( country in a country ) called Liberland with a cryptocurrency as their main payment method. Please reply here what you think and if you would be happy or not if your national currency is BTC.

National currencies based on the blockchain is possible. This is assuming that the government of your country will want decentralised banking.

That would mean the end of BTC. It's the best side of BTC. It isn't related to any country or even a place anywhere. More and more people don't have a national currency (in Europe, or in Africa), and that's good, even with flaws in most common currencies.

I don't mean it like this, they won't take our lovely BTC just for them. They will only choose it they national currency. Bitcoin will go up. Just imagine when you have a store and you start accepting Bitcoin, same with a country. That's what I mean.

It makes not much sense to "nationalize" Bitcoin, because it can't be controlled. There's no benefit for a state to declare Bitcoin as its official currency - it would make more sense to allow free competition of any form of private money and abandoning the concept of national currency altogether. If a state isn't hostile towards Bitcoin, it may just allow its use without excessive regulations.

What makes more sense for a state would be to buy Bitcoin as reserve / investment. The risk-reward-ratio is extremely good, because if the state would subsequently declare that it has bought Bitcoin, the value would skyrocket from this announcement alone.

ya.ya.yo!

don't think any country will ever have bitcoin as main currency. something that they can't control will not be allowed. however, they might create their own crypto currency at some point. it's all about control.

I dont think bitcoin is going to be accepted as national currency anywhere but a crypto like bitcoin might be. I dont think it would be a bad idea for a country with stable economy to convert all the fiat to crypto.

I'm not sure.. haven't think that far yet. because it still seems impossible.
but it would be great if a government openly support bitcoin and encourage their citizen to use it.... wait a sec, that's also very unlikely if they have their own currency. AAAAARRRRGHH

This could not have happen. If country goes low on money they just print more money to inflate causing people to invest and make purchase. If bitcoin national currency and funds go low they cannot print them more of it.

Of course it can. There are many countries that don't have their own currency. A country using Bitcoin would be just another one of them.

The interesting part would be the effect on the financial regulations. In the U.S., for example, Bitcoin would change from a "virtual convertible currency", to a "currency", and that would completely which regulations apply to it. Bitcoin would no longer be affected by all the ridiculous "virtual currency" laws and regulations.

This is exact reason greece had fail recent. If they were not Euro they could just inflate.

It is not possible at a moment that bitcoin becomes a national currency of any country. Governments of the countries will never allow it to happen and they will never support the crypto currency to be the national currency as they don't have any control over it so it would become difficult for them to continue their corrupted activities  >:(

Dont see it happening anytime soon.  A country giving up on their fiat can cause panic.   I mean look at Greece trying to stay with euro.

Your country's will lose a lot of stability in minds of investors changing national currency.  Also BTC still has some variance making it hard to be only currency. 

A store for example would be a nightmare to put new tags each time BTC went up or down.

The reason that Bitcoin would not be adopted by any country is that it is currently too small and too volatile.

But, not for any of these reasons:


Inflating is not a solution. It just turns the problem into a different problem. Look at Zimbabwe. That is where Argentina is heading, and where Greece would be heading if it could print more money.


Not necessarily. Countries have switched currencies in the past with no panic.


There are many countries that don't have any control over the currency they use.

Have to agree with everyone who says it's unlikely to be accepted as a national currency. The people having debt speeds up the economy, inflation leads to people with less value in the money that they do have, and encourages them to spend it (or work more generating more tax for the state) rather than save it - again, speeding up the economy.

All of these things are more benefit to the state rather than the people. Which wouldn't be so bad if we could actually trust them and be sure they did sensible things with our money and national currency.

Control the money, control the people.

Bitcoin is backwards to the above, it's like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. They don't go together. Bitcoin is a good thing for individuals who wish to retain value in their currency/asset, but terrible news for bank monopolies/governments.

There are only two ways to attempt to control Bitcoin.

1. Alter the public perception of Bitcoin to something very negative and keep it that way to try to prevent mass-adoption for as long as possible, at the very least, marginalize it. The biased media is doing this pretty much everyday now. There is a poster on this site who also has some shill accounts who always posts negative titled inflammatory threads. All those thread titles show up on Google searches when now/future people search for anything 'Bitcoin'.

2. Control the end points/buy points. A leaked paper already alluded to this development. It pointed to the fact there would, in effect, be two kinds of Bitcoin, transactions that had already been connected to an ID and can be tracked, and the underside of Bitcoin outside of the system that could never be controlled.

The above two points are already being implemented on a daily basis.

Edit/add: 3. Some form of attack, spam transactions/51% attack. A large group of miners deciding to not accept transactions to the degree, and over a period of time, that they seriously make everyone question the Bitcoin protocol's practicality.


Having said all of that, I could see Canada perhaps going for it one day. It would take major restructuring though.

Good article about banks/Bitcoin here: http://www.coindesk.com/research-banks-unprepared-for-digital-disruption/ (http://www.coindesk.com/research-banks-unprepared-for-digital-disruption/)

I think this is exactly as absurd as asking for the internet to be a national telecommunications network.

Bitcoin is already a global currency, it has no need for flags or borders. Such antiquated cultural relics are better suited for museums.

This is an excellent point. Although it has to be said, it couldn't hurt the public perception/price of Bitcoin if some country did adopt it.

It can be reality that bitcoin as a national currency if there is any country adopted it as their currency..i think it is just up to any government of a country to do that..if they want what they need to do is just to make a rule..and it is not hard to do that.

I used to think that was possible...  The reality is, no.

no country (government) in their right mind would do such a thing.

• bitcoin is a global currency so you can not restrict it to one country and also the price of it is not in control of one country
• the government can not control bitcoin so they wouldn't have the power they have with fiat
• they can not track it so it would open a lot of criminal activity in their country
• they can always print out their own money but not bitcoin

According to coin base, Hong Kong is the fastest non-American adopter of Bitcoin. Hong Kong has what is known as a linked currency. The value of Hong Kong dollars is linked to the best currency for international trade. It was pounds, but it is dollars now. It might be bitcoins tomorrow.

Some countries have a dual currency system. For example, in panama, people accept dollars or Panamanian balboas. Balboas are linked to dollars, too.

In other words, many countries do not have the ability to inflate their money supply at will.

liberland was going to accepting, it, while i know their country is a joke is still the first attempt to accept a cryptocurrency as a main currency, and it's the only one where a decentralized payment system will be accepted

because any real country with a governemtns will go against its interest if bitcoin is accepted not only as an alternative

but i could see an exception in those country that have lost their governments because of bankruptcy or because of corruption, if their citizens can start a revolution, the thing might come true

This is possible in say, 50 years plus time.  I do not selling this as a possible thing in the future I am looking at.

If we have learnt anything, it is that you never connect something that is vital to the running of the country to the internet. That makes using Bitcoin as a national currency, problematic.

BTC won't be a national currency because it's global and we are too soon for a global cashless society.

A national crypto currency is very plausible, however.

Yea, this would be amazing. The question, will Bitcoin be still here in 50 years? It can horribly crash tomorrow, in a year or in a 10 years. That's really hard to say. I would be really happy if there's bitcoin as a national currncy for my country, but somebody should learn people about Bitcoin, how it works and stuff like this..

I wonder how huge the blockchain is by that time.

I certainly hope not. The global adoption means that we would be able to use bitcoin at our will. But something like this adopted as a national currency would give more hide seek factor. But I am very much excited to see the adoption of Blockchain technology.

But I don't mean it like that, I already said it.. I didn't want to say that for example Germany took BTC and only their people can use it. Everyone will be able to use it, but just one country will use it as a national currency for them. You can pay with $ in the USA, but you can use them in Germany too, that's what I mean.

I just want to bump this up, so new people in a different time zones can see this thread and respond to us with their suggestions. I'm happy to read everything from you friends! :)

Let's imagine the Greece situation and if they would have bitcoin as nation currency, may the banks bankrupt ?

It would certainly mitigate the risk and loss of people's assets which would be spread across two platforms (euro and bitcoin in this case; or Hong Kong dollars and bitcoin like in a previous example).

For a crypto currency to work as a national currency, there would have to be a weak power held by the central bank. Otherwise regulations will not make it permissible to carry the convenience of a crypto currency.

Secondly bitcoin is too volatile to become adopted as a primary currency by a nation. Perhaps a dual-currency but even then it would have to be hedged to prevent volatility.

Greece would have made for an interesting experiment had it exited from the euro.

This article has some good reading.

Countries Where Bitcoin Is Legal & Illegal (http://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/041515/countries-where-bitcoin-legal-illegal.asp)

But do you think that bitcoin will survive for next 50 years?? Time to think... ??? As bitcoin is not an end there would be many other currencies which would come into existence and might be better than bitcoins so can't say it as a national currency at a moment.

It would be great to set up a new community somewhere and adopt bitcoin as a small scale social experiment to see how it all plays out.

No doubt it is a global currency but the fact is how many of them are using it? Is 50% of population across the world is using it? If yes then it can be a global/national currency or else it is not. When 9 out of 10 will start using bitcoins, then it we can say it as a national currency.

Nah it will never happen.

Absolutely no way something like that would work with Bitcoin in its current form. Can you imagine a whole economy trying to adjust to Bitcoin's whims every few minutes? Plus interfacing with the rest of the world would be near impossible, like trying to force an HDMI connector into an AV socket  :D

Why do you think this? Can you please explain it to me, why won't it work good?
I can't really see any problem if I don't mind about banks that can't control it..

1. Bitcoin is way too volatile. For individuals and small companies it is manageable but for a whole country economy to revolve around Bitcoin would be pure insanity.
2. Satoshi owns more than 1,000,000 BTC, can you imagine what would happen if he decided to dump?
3. The Bitcoin network is lawless and relies on trust to function. Anyone owning 51% or more of the mining hashrate would have considerable amount of control over the network. Such a country would have to keep its fingers crossed that it survives the day.
4. Anonymity would also be a problem. Transparency is essential for government, people and the rest of the world to work seamlessly together.

all the citizens of a country can accept bitcoin as their currency to use everywhere , but i don't think any of the government would like that . so they are not going to allow this to become a thing in their country.

besides bitcoin price is not yet at a stable stage , it is so volatile to be able to be used in those big scales.

You assume Satoshi owns 1 million btc, which is hard to believe. He wasn't the only miner back then. It was insanely easy to get a ton of coins mined in a very short time.

The value back then was barely worth mentioning; $1 would buy you over 1000 bitcoins. Living with the fear of seeing these potentially "lost" coins being dumped at once is not the way to go.

1. Bitcoin's volatility will decrease with a biggermarketcap.
2. Satoshi will never dump. At this point is reasonable to asume he lost those coins. He would have dumped already.
3. Laws can be applied, which why regulations are going on. 51% attack is not a problem, it's highly overblown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM
4. Cash is more anonymous than Bitcoin.

it's not hard to believe back then it was possible to mine from 1k to 10k coins and counting per day, i remember that with diff 7k i was mining 0.01-0.02 a day, at the launch of bitcoin diff was 1 7M times lower

even if he was the only miner for 1 month only(probably true, within the first month of bitcoin , none knew about it), he would have mines something around 300k coins already...

yes, citizens would accept it as a currency but the government would never come in support of the bitcoin as they are aware that it would be end of their corrupted activities. The government has never thought anything in the benefits of the citizens.

I think the US government had around 30000 BTC, so they basically supported it.
There's an article: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/us-government-sells-20-million-in-bitcoin-to-mystery-bidder-9578336.html

This can work but bitcoin is too volatile.

No need to estimate badly. According to the block chain, the millionth bitcoin was mined on 7/22/2009. See https://blockchain.info/block-height/19999
Others were mining by then, so he didn't get them all.

Anyway, Satoshi's hoard (and those of the other earliest adopters) are a substantial risk to Bitcoin adoption.

Bitcoin is impossible to be used as primary currency of any real country. Definitely not now in its current form. There are too many problems bitcoin has now,
not to mention we are not ready for totally virtual currency. In the future when society will be more computerized and internet will be in the air everywhere bitcoin could be used as a currency.
But for now it is used mainly as a toy currency of nerds.

Do you know about casascius coins? Government could make something like this, and every time a human with no smartphone / wallet would like to spend it, he can scan QR code from the coin in the shop ( They would have to add it here.. ).

Bitcoin being used as a national currency would be a very interesting experiment. I think it would be interesting to see how it would affect everyday life living in a nation that exclusively uses Bitcoin. In my opinion, it would be useful and very cool if it were possible to go to an everyday grocery store and pay for your groceries with Bitcoin, instead of cash.

Less than 100 people owns most of the bitcoins. The bitcoins in circulation is just scraps. Sathoshi is not the only one to hold way to many btc to make btc trustworthy as a real currency.

I think a nation would adopt Bitcoin if The people are already using Bitcoin widely

i'm sure that he didn't stop there and has continued to mine for at least one year, actually i was not arguing that he didn't get the first million, but that he did indeed hold 1M bitcoin...

This is bitcoin's biggest flaw overall. It is for this reason why it could not be adopted as a national currency. It is not equal.

This is incredibly ridiculous. Since when fiats are equal?

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/10/14/1413320598501_Image_galleryImage_image001_png.JPG

Wealth distribution in dollar alone is insanely unequal, but guess what, it's a scam, and BTC isn't, because BTC has a fixed supply, and people that bought early on took a huge risk by buying something worthless, so they deserve the wealth, unlike the masters of the dollar that keep printing fake money out of thin air.
Currencies will never be equal unless you want communism, and with BTC we get a fair system. Unequal distribution isn't unfair in BTC.

Not only does nobody know how many people control any portion of the bitcoins, but equality (in terms of distribution) of a currency is irrelevant. A person with more bitcoins than 90% of the people on the planet could still be poorer than those 90%. Anyway, equal distribution is impossible because as soon as someone spends theirs, equality is broken --  they have 0 and someone else has twice as many as everyone else.


Wealth distribution in dollars is not the same as distribution of dollars.

Yes I agree that the distribution of dollars is unequal. I think there is a pyramid with bitcoin from hoarded coins when it was created. I would purport that a for a crypto currency to be implemented as a domestic currency it would need to replace the inequality of both the dollar and bitcoin.

The people who are in oppose of bitcoins would surely die without food if this is the situation in the coming years where you can buy your stuff by paying bitcoins. And if it becomes mandatory even they have to buy anything using bitcoins.Even if they don't like it.

No they won't lol. When a country in EU had it's own currency and changed to €, people just came into their banks and exchanges and changed their currency for €, everything that wasn't changed for a new currency was worth nothing. The same thing can be done with BTC.

A hybrid of bitcoin and cash is still the ideal.

It would take a country with a pretty weak national currency to use BTC as official currency.  Just is a lot of variation in value, which is hard as far as a government based money.

Bitcoin will need to stabilize on a price before it really could be looked at for a countries currency.

One of the groups you mentioned did print their own money, and it was not the fiat guys... :D

Yes, this. And I really think that adoption of Bitcoin can help Greece a lot. It can solve some problems with economics, but there are also cons of this. I think that Bitcoin as it is now, wouldn't be good as a national currency, but maybe in the next 20 years? No one knows..

People have lost many things man, and the stuff they handle have much value than the money they have in banks hold
I would consider a bitcoin land lol, an island which works only with bitcoin.
And everyone to wear something that is bitcoin related

 This is going to sound crazy! I think bitcoin won't become real currency since the government can't adjust the money supply and lead to price floating！！But no doubt, bitcoin will become more and more popular in the near future. virtual currency will be the world!! And as an aside, i'm glad to recommend you all  a new e currency---Epay-money from epay global payment. It's free for you to pay and get paid when using the epay global payment.

You seem to have missed 'Bitcoin in its current form' in my initial comment. Even so, the points you make are not entirely correct.
1. Volatility has got nothing to do with market capitalization. Coin distribution, number of users and demand are some factors that directly affect price. If the order books from the various exchanges are not able to seamlessly absorb a dump of say 1,000,000 BTC (hint hint  :P ) you gonna see a massive crash.
2. This claim/statement has no substance. You'd be insane to build your country's economy around this assumption.
3. Other than a slightly arrogant Antonopoulos, that the threat exists is enough. That he doesn't see any way for such an attack to work does not mean that there isn't any.
4. Agreed, hard cash is more anonymous than Bitcoin. But you're ignoring the second part of point 4 where I clearly explain why anonymity would be a problem. Buying stuff anonymously in a shop with hard cash is one thing, Microsoft sealing a deal with a few bags of Dollar bills is another. Banks link money to real identifiable people in a way that is not possible with Bitcoin in it's current form.

There is no reason why it cannot be a national currency, but we are hoping it would become a global currency.  ;) It should compete with the $US / Euro / Pound

The only problem I see, is a high volatility if it goes global, as we can see with the other currencies where more than one country accepted a single currency. If one or two of the countries struggle, the rest struggle

too. The PIGS during the economic crysis is a good example, of what can happen, if a single currency is adopted on a global scale.

Is is realistic to expect Argentina, Venezuela, or similar to move in this direction? Also could we see a sovereign officially adopt bitcoin when they're considering reissuing a new currency, after failure?

at the moment no government is ready adopt bitcoin as their national currency because it needs raise more public awareness about innovation, in the begging bitcoin is little complicated to understand and use so it will be much hard for majority of the country to use it like normal fiat currency for their daily usage but in coming year bitcoin would be global currency.

It is not possible that one country adopt bitcoin as its currency. With bitcoin it is not possible to do monetary policies and without that politics it is very hard to govern. Let's say that in a moment the country is in crisis. Needed money to increase the power of buying. So the government take debit through the treasury bonds with interest to the whom are money and that money are invested in various areas to increase the consume in the economy. With bitcoin this is impossible because while in the first case the money needed are produced by the central bank in the second case the quantity of bitcoin in circulation cannot be more than can be produced regularly by the process of mining. So no money and the crisis cannot be solved. This is a simplified case that show that the bitcoin cannot be national country. But the monetary policies are more complex and bitcoin cannot fulfill those.

It is possible. There are many countries that do not have their own currency.

True. Currency substitution usually takes place when a small country's monetary policy fails. If they adopt a strong currency like the dollar, it gives foreign investors confidence to enter the country.

No country will adopt bitcoin as its country, since its government cant control it and cant get something useful for them. The government is just a group of politician, not bitcoin enthusiast.

but what if , it is adopted from the citizens of that country, and they say basically fuck you government? surely their GOV can not stop them if they decide to move in this way

it's not like we are living in dictatorial regime

I agree with this.
No government wants something they can't control.
How the state will conduct its own fiscal and budget policy if they can affect the value of their own currencies?
This is simply impossible and unlikely scenario in the real politics.
Bitcoin has been and will remain the currency of individuals, not the currency of government or state.

There are many countries that have already adopted currencies that they cannot control. There will be more, and eventually when Bitcoin becomes widely used and more stable, a country may prefer to adopt it over another country's currency because they can't get screwed by that country's monetary policy.

If you live in a somewhat civilized country you had to be an idiot to do that. A population of idiots fucking their own country in to oblivion. Great idea...

This is not as easy as you think, with fluctuation of bitcoin price, it will affect price of goods or any stuff in that country, which it mean those price will change every day. Today you can get a BigMac for 0.02BTC, but who knows its price maybe get higher like 0.025BTC tomorrow. You should think about it.

I think the governments dont adopt bitcoin, just legalized it, thats a different thing imo. Legalizing mean government just let its people using and trading with it.

Only a nation of people who are pure of soul would consider it.  Fiat is king because it allows for stealing from the wealth of its holders by the printers of the currency, who can then use a portion of the stolen wealth to buy off the issuer's population and quell their resistance to such actions i.e. keep the process of wealth-extraction afloat, increasing the printer's power indefinitely, even to the point of dictatorship and collapse, parasite killing host and self essentially (Third Reich being among the most obvious disasters.)  For an entire nation to accept a money invincible to infinite monetary expansion means that the society is not kind to bribes in return for their posterity and individual power.  It would be debilitating to empire as there's no way to transfer wealth from individual to empire stealthily, but for democratic entities I can see crypto functioning just fine.

If that happens then the banks would work with bitcoin, the price will be the same for a long time like the fiat currencies today.
And tipping will be by bitcoin, nice.

Realistically this is the type of governments that could potentially adopt it. Whether or not they are innovative enough to do it is the question.

It would be hard for governments to adopt it. Also and the people of these countries will become confused of the new currency

It is never late, but the people will be hard to understand it.
Or if something else will be invented then the bitcoin would be easy to integrade 

I dont think is to late, but the bitcoin needs some time to be implemented to the goverments
Dont know how many years but it will take few to see the changese

Since bitcoin is a decentralized system currency, there is no chance to government take control of it, and if government adopt it, bitcoin will lost its users, same thing like fiat. Some governments have make their virtual currency for their country, I dunno if their product have got many customer or not.

Nah it will never be a national currency, but it can be a global currency and we are the ones who are going to make it.
As more and more institutions are being established in the field of Bitcoin, it is promoting it towards a global currency.

is there a country without investor? so, if bitcoin take over whole nation's financial system, there will be no investor?

Also Bitcoin can't support the number of transactions per second needed for a national currency.

Why not?

limitation to one 1MB,but you can actually go higher by overwhelming the blochchain, it will be changed in the future or sure, or a better alternative will come out, either way i don't see as a big problem and it will not hinder the adoption

I predict that new countries or existing countries with small GDP and small populations might welcome Bitcoin and might be influenced to look at converting to Bitcoin

In theory, sure. A country can generally implement whatever internal economic policy they want, including specifying the official currency or even two currencies.

That is not possible, even if it is small country or a big country unless there is involvement and acceptance from the government. If government supports then only it can get into mainstream, but government will never support bitcoins as they don't have a control over it.

This is already being developed by central banks:

http://www.coindesk.com/deloitte-central-bank-cryptocurrency/

I can't imagine the banking cartels or any country with a privatized monetary reserve system would ever allow that control to slip away with the adoption of Bitcoin, rather I see BTC acting as an alternative monetary system that operates within existing economies.

That would be a revolution in Banking! It would be simply great if we had governments willing to go against the banking system...

Yeah that would be dream come true, if the governments goes against the banking system, it would directly benefit the individuals who wants bitcoin to get on mainstream and we can get rid of banking system.

It could n't be acceptable. Since BTC are decentralised so Democratic countries can't be accepted as a National currency.

It is totally impossible. Are to many the factors that don't allow this and I can named only two. With bitcoin cannot be made monetary policies. So cannot be managed the currency of the nation like the other currencies. In some situation needed to much money in circulation and the Central Banks print more than needed and put those in circulation. With bitcoin is impossible to do this. Bitcoin is produced in the way we all know. Every ten minutes are produced 25 bitcoin, Nor less and nor more. So in the above situation the state will fail because of lack of currency in the market. This is the first reason. The second is that bitcoin is currency of the world is not and cannot be own but one nation only. And if cannot be totally own by the nation cannot be national currency. The economy of that country will be in serious risk if the currency is not owned by that country because of manipulation of the value or manipulation of quantity in circulation. Other reason might be because bitcoin is ignored from the most of countries and a nation cannot have a currency that is not ignored from almost all the world.

As for Liberland it is true that had as a currency bitcoin. I think because the only resident of this country is a bitcoiner and because him cannot create a Central Bank to produce its money.

And at the end you ask if me it will be happy if bitcoin will be the currency of my country. My answer is yes if all the bitcoins in the circulation will be own by my country. I will (the Central Bank of my country) produce even the physical coin so bitcoin will be a full money and can fulfill all the duties of the money. The coins in internet will be produced in our Central Bank and we will have a big amount produced before its launch in circulation.

The idea of having a national currency boils down to the ability of the government to influence and control the price and relative exchange rate working to the advantage of the country's stare of economy. In other terms, they need to adjust it according to the economic indicators and that includes the ability to control by printing money. Thus, no matter what they need it to be centralized and for that reason bitcoin will not be able to fit in.

Yes,it is possible since bitcoin has many features as a digital currency..