I agree with you in the sense that all macro patterns in complex systems are meta stable. And no system will survive forever. My disagreement comes from that abandoning incrementalism and suing for compete revolution is profoundly dangerous given the complexity of modern states, modern economies and the modern world. 

We agree that these breakdowns are often associated with war. But I disagree that money can be a limiting factor -- especially for say a great power conflict. Governments can just nationalize supply chains and defense production directly. They don't HAVE to go into debt to sustain a war. And if the war is considered to be existential, it's likely this is what they'll do. In fact, the US already had laws on the books that give the president expansive authority to seize control of production in the presence of a real or apprehended war -- the Defense Production Act, for example. 

So I get my back up against the wall when people suggest something like Bitcoin can bend us away from these kinds of risks because of any discipline they think it can impose on governments, in this sense. 

I'm willing to concede that wars like Iraq in 2003, conducted at the height of America's unipolar moment, within a largely peacetime framework of government debt and spending, could potentially have been attenuated if the public had felt the effects of that more directly, as you pointed out on WBD. 

But I think existential wars are different. The rules change. The government can just force industry into a wartime economy and use production nationalization as a tool, if necessary. Which happened under FDR in WWII. 

 Straw men argument, the easy way out from the work necessary to form a sound idea. How about you summarize Lyn position in the strongest possible way before attacking it? 

 I'm not *quite* directly disagreeing with Lyn per se. I'm emphasizing an orthogonal point about the importance of stability, and suggesting that if the dollar collapses in a catastrophic way in the near future, then I'm not confident we survive the chaos at all. I don't think we get a chance to reset with Bitcoin. I think it's just potentially game over for our civilization. If people are still living, they'll be living in a dark age. 

 transition time seems smart for human coping abilities 

 You're both right.

Hard money only would impose a structural obstacle that can still be overcome to achieve nefarious goals like war. But it's not a silver bullet for solving problems caused by our innate tendencies:

Humanities biggest strengths (tribalism, empathy, cooperation) are also its biggest weaknesses (groupthink, weaponization of emotions, systemic overshoot). Technology *could* change that because it codes behavior. But that would require software (culture) to override hardware (above mentioned tendencies hardcoded into our genes). 

The only way you could achieve this is by literal brainwashing of civilizations with new objectives overriding our evolutionary ones. The Culture by Bainks is a good fictional example of this. North Korea comes closest to a real-world example, albeit a distorted one.

Hard money alone is just a one tool in a hypothetical set of tools that would be needed to fix this.