And what's the backing of US citizens paying taxes? If all of the population decided to not pay taxes tomorrow, what power US government has to make them pay up? Government itself operates on the backing of people's consent. That's not too different from Bitcoin users' consent.

> If all of the population decided to not pay taxes tomorrow, what power US government has to make them pay up?

If all the population did that, that would mean the government had decided that. The population and the government aren't disjoint sets.

So you too are saying government is there by populations consent. Taxes and USD are by products of that consent. So is bitcoin, or any other medium of exchange really.

No, it's not just backed by mere consent. Try not paying your taxes. It's backed by the people who will make good on those promises by force.

It is true that nothing absolutely guarantees the value of the US dollar in the strongest absolute sense, but that's true of absolutely everything. There are no absolute stores of value that are guaranteed. (This bothers a lot of people, but it's true.) But there's a qualitative difference between being backed by the US government and being backed by nothing at all, a very substantial one.

I would point out that one of the usual things touted in BitCoin's favor is precisely that fiat currency can be arbitrarily manipulated by governments; this is possible because the backer of a currency can manipulate said currency, in a way that I cannot. On the other hand, I can arbitrarily issue and manipulate JerfDollars, but nobody takes them. (Not even me.) One of the things BitCoin tries to solve is precisely that people don't like what's backing the US Dollar, and they'd rather try something else. If it were indeed a backingless currency precisely like the US Dollar, the entire point of BitCoin goes up in smoke; what's the difference between two backingless currencies? Not much. In trying to claim that the two currencies are identical in this fashion, you may win the battle but you lose the war entirely.

Yes, but the implications of not consenting are grossly different. If folks don't consent to taxes and USD, they're essentially giving up on things like Social Security, the value of their homes (both in terms of security and transaction value), the value of their income, etc. ... all kinds of secondary effects. If they give up on Bitcoin, they might lose the value of their holdings (which could be zero) but they don't have those secondary losses.

No, if you don't consent to taxes you get put in a cage. If you don't consent to bitcoin you don't get caught up in a speculative bubble.

if an individual don't consent to paying taxes, they get put in a cage. But if an entire population don't consent to paying taxes, something else is going on.