No doubt a transition to hard money would be painful, but I don't think anyone is calling for an instantaneous transition. Right now, Bitcoiners will be happy if more people simply opt into it.
The argument about countries needing fiat systems in order to compete wasn't convincing, though. There's path dependence here. Look at how many countries stabilize their economies by pegging to the US dollar. It's not that you need a fiat system in order to be competitive, it's that you need stability relative to the social consensus unit of account, which happens to be the dollar right now. If the dollar was itself pegged to hard money, we might have avoided some of the problems with a fiat system, both within the US, and globally, without having lost competitiveness.
No doubt a transition to hard money would be painful, but I don't think anyone is calling for an instantaneous transition. Right now, Bitcoiners will be happy if more people simply opt into it.
The argument about countries needing fiat systems in order to compete wasn't convincing, though. There's path dependence here. Look at how many countries stabilize their economies by pegging to the US dollar. It's not that you need a fiat system in order to be competitive, it's that you need stability relative to the social consensus unit of account, which happens to be the dollar right now. If the dollar was itself pegged to hard money, we might have avoided some of the problems with a fiat system, both within the US, and globally, without having lost competitiveness.