If You Don't Trust The Dollar, You Have Lots Of Good Options Besides BitCoin

Evidently some people in the realm of monetary crankdom are excited about a new firm called BitCoin that's going to be offering private e-money of some kind. I'm happy to give hard money types as many distractions and outlets as possible so as to minimize the amount of time they spend on their effort to destroy the world economy by influencing the Federal Reserve, but I agree with Tim Lee that there are a lot of problems with this idea.

But I think the most fundamental one is that many libertarians don't seem to realize that they've already won on the question of currencies. The United States of America doesn't restrict outward flows of capital and our exchange rate floats. If you lack confidence in the US dollar there's nothing stopping you from ditching your US dollars in favor of Canadian dollars or Australian dollars or Euros or Mexican Pesos or Swiss Francs or British Pounds or Swedish Krona or whatever else you want.

You don't need to buy gold, you don't need to buy survival seeds, and you don't need to invent a new form of currency. You just need to swap some of your existing stockpile of currency and use it to buy some other currency.