The world runs on fiat.
When the FRN loses even more buying power after the next round of debasement, people will start looking for others places to try to keep from sinking. Traditionally, it's been metal. Bitcoin will just add another option. That will add to its mainstream appeal.
Sure, with the added disadvantage of bitcoin disapearing the moment society goes broken.
Metals don't do that.
Just because there are electricity and internet outages in one country does not mean the entire world is suffering a similar fate. Traveling from a broken country to a non-broken country with your assets in tow may prove quite dangerous. However, my Bitcoins will be waiting patiently on the block chain wherever in the world I may end up.
Guess again.
If the bills are not payed a country goes down.
If that country carries some essential infrastructure or commerce component of the world economy it can affect the rest of the world heavily.
If, for instance, the USA would go down the euro will go down, china will go down, etc, etc, etc.
It would be more likely that the destruction of the governments would allow anarchocapitalist communities to flourish. there would be a period of instability, but
it seems to me that theres enough nowhow for people to start generating their own electricity again and networking their computers relatively quickly, and having seen how vulnerable fiat "wealth" is to inflationary manipulation, people would be ready to turn to a truly stable deflationary currency.
LOL ok, how will the people of new york make their own electricity and enough of it to run the computers that are needed for bitcoin? Or even better, how will they do it before starving?
Where will they grow their food?
Who will grow their food and for what service in return?
The problem is that a city like new york cannot survive without sitting firmly in the current economy.
If the current economy collapses and goes away they are mostly screwed. I mean, people are going to die, people are going to starve, people will be mostly out of work, people are going to raid etc etc etc.
That's the kind of 'instability' we're talking about.
After such an event it is questionable wether something like a pc, or even bitcoin, will meant the same thing it means now.
But is suspect we would reboot the current system long before it comes to this.