The lesson I took from that country’s repeated financial meltdowns is that any fiat monetary system requires a bedrock of trust in the nation’s governing institutions. When people don’t trust their government, the system is always prone to collapse. It wasn’t until I discovered bitcoin, four years after my 2009 departure from Buenos Aires, that I understood this clearly. I’d been well aware of Argentines’ lack of trust in government – the local commentariat endlessly talked of their leaders’ corruption. But only after learning of how bitcoin’s decentralized cryptographic protocol allowed users to transact without having to trust centralized intermediaries did I see the connection between that trust deficit and Argentina’s financial dysfunction. You’re reading Money Reimagined, a weekly look at the technological, economic and social events and trends that are redefining our relationship with money and transforming the global financial system. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. Argentina is by no means alone in this problem. But as its government finalizes yet another bond restructuring deal with investors, this time to write down $65 billion in foreign debt, and with its perpetually volatile economy facing its worst contraction ever, it’s worth exploring this more deeply. Now, more than ever, Argentina’s failures offer a cautionary tale, especially for the U.S. And with speculation growing over changes to the global financial system, cryptocurrency and blockchain models could help us design systems more resilient to this kind of failure. Note, this is not a “bitcoin fixes this” essay. Believing that bitcoin alone will save all Argentines – or Turks, Venezuelans or Filipinos – is, as Coinshares Chief Strategy Officer Meltem Demirors noted this week, naive and offensive. This hard-to-use technology is no silver bullet for the root causes of economic destitution.