Sure, if the government in question has the funds on hand or can borrow them. But they can't just literally increase the number of Bitcoin by a factor of 5 [1] in order to give trillions of dollars to people who have demonstrated their incompetence at handling that money.
> But they can't just literally increase the number of Bitcoin by a factor of 5 [1] in order to give trillions of dollars to people who have demonstrated their incompetence at handling that money.
Sure you can. It's code, why wouldn't you be able to change it?
There is no reason that cryptocurrency has to be inherently deflationary, rewards can easily be issued at a constant rate or any other rate. You are mixing up Bitcoin, the libertarian implementation, with the abstract cryptocurrency in general. This is an implementation detail.
In fact, there is actually already a rather storied history of centralized interventions to bail out failing institutions. See: the DAO hack and the subsequent rollback...
Could Vitalik just as easily have said "JP Morgan now has +5 million Eth?" Absolutely.
Nobody else necessarily needs to accept that version of the blockchain (see: Ethereum Classic) but there is a network effect here: if everyone else agrees to accept that version of history then sucks to be you, everyone wants to deal with Eth not PaulCoins. And people tend not to be willing to accept calamity when offered an alternative. Ethereum Classic is the version of history which best upholds those high-minded libertarian ideals, but it's also the version of history where a single attacker has 15% of all the ether.
> Sure you can. It's code, why wouldn't you be able to change it?
Fair enough. I'd expand that to say "code + consensus", which is what the rest of your post expands on. If the Bitcoin (for example) community really buys into the idea that we need to bail out some set of organizations, it's possible to execute a fork to do that. And the number of validating bitcoin clients out there is pretty large, so it would require a lot of buy-in.
It would have to be a hard fork (it would be possible as a soft fork, segwith-style, but the new coins issued would not be able to mix with pre-bailout coins unless clients updated).
To be honest, though, you're probably right. In my mind, depressingly so. The biggest takeaway from "too big to fail", even amongst progressives, seems to be that we have to shrink or break up the organizations that are too big to fail, rather than letting them fail -- only diehard libertarians and outcast Austrian economists believe that. The next time we hit this, we'll give the money to AIG to give to Goldman and buy Chris Dodd another house and move on with our lives while we get busy creating the next bubble (I think retail this time; that seems to be where the easy credit has relocated).
I think if cryptocurrency were ever "officially" adopted it would be a centralized model anyway. Something like Ripple or that proposed Canadian cryptocurrency.
With a centralized model, there's no need for miners or mining, because you trust the system that you run. And transactions could be extremely fast.
Basically, it would look a lot like a bank with an API and public/private key signatures, running on a regular old database. Governments would probably love this, in fact, since it would prevent the cash economy from stealing their tax revenue.
You may or may not consider this "cryptocurrency", but then again most "blockchain" companies these days are just using it as a fancy database. Why do IOT devices monitoring production of $PRODUCT need to sync a blockchain? Why not just have them hit a REST API that is controlled by the client? Again, you can presumably always trust yourself/your company, so the trustless part doesn't add much value, and for a lot of this stuff there is no real need for consensus-resolution type functionality that the Bitcoin part provides.
If all you need is Merkle trees... those have been around for what, 40 years now? Bitcoin didn't invent them, Ralph Merkle did.
> If the Bitcoin (for example) community really buys into the idea that we need to bail out some set of organizations, it's possible to execute a fork to do that. And the number of validating bitcoin clients out there is pretty large, so it would require a lot of buy-in.
With crypto, you are essentially switching the authority figure from an elected government to a bunch of faceless miners forming an oligarchy.
I don't think you understand how that works. The government didn't literally print more money, they bought securities from the banks in exchange for credit in the central bank's account. No actual money was printed. The increase in the BASE is because the Fed was reducing its reserves.
This is entirely possible to do in Bitcoin, you can still have a "lender of last resort".
Not "credit" in the sense of a "line of credit", but "credit" in the sense of "increased the amount held in their account" -- the banks, if they so desired, could ask the Fed to deliver, as cash, the money held in reserves, so long as they upheld their reserve requirements at the same time, and the Fed would have, by law, been forced to instruct the Treasury to deliver the specie.
Of course, the plan was that the troubled assets would be purchased by the Fed, an sold in a non-firesale fashion, and cancelled against the increase in the money used to cancel that out, to return the held reserves back to the trendline that predated 2008.
Congress had instructed, through TARP, the Fed to purchase "troubled assets" and had authorized amounts, but the Fed ignored those instructions and restrictions entirely and purchased none of the troubled assets, instead bolstering the reserves through the standard open market operations, and later, through quantitative easing, which is just an acceleration of the standard open market operations, with the purpose of creating enough inflation to allow the economy to recover. But that inflation didn't happen (still hasn't happened) for reasons that literally no person on earth can explain. Then the Fed did some balance sheet gymnastics (mark-to-market is a glorious thing) to show that all the TARP funds had been repaid (with interest!).
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BASE