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"One should not have to consult an exchange rate to figure out how much their currency is worth. They should know what it's worth by how much it costs for a dozen eggs. If that number changes rapidly (dozen eggs costs 1 BTC Monday, 3 on Friday, .5 next month, 100 in the future, .002 after that) well.... you don't have a currency, you have a speculative commodity."

This is just not true for many currencies that have undergone hyper-inflation and hyper-deflation. You are only comparing btc to the most dominant currencies in the world right now, and btc obviously is not one of the most dominant currencies.



> This is just not true for many currencies that have undergone hyper-inflation and hyper-deflation.

When that happens, people tend to abandon them as currencies (though a currency undergoing hyperdeflation would be hoarded as a store of value).


Actually they often do not really abandon the currency, they just issue a new dollar that removes a bunch of orders of magnitude from the dollars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_inflation#Currency


Users (not issuers) abandon the currency as a currency until the measures are taken to assure that some measure of value stability will be restored.

Doing what amounts to a a "reverse split" on the currency is a measure issuers take to get the unit value of currency to a usable value.


>This is just not true for many currencies that have undergone hyper-inflation and hyper-deflation.

This is true. But generally speaking, people go quite a bit out of their way to use currencies that are perceived to have a predictable future value.

This is why the dollar (and the Euro) is so popular the world over; it's value is pretty predictable, compared to most other commodities.




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