sj_zero on Nostr: I tend to agree with you that the likelihood of a full mad Max civilizational ...

I tend to agree with you that the likelihood of a full mad Max civilizational collapse is pretty limited. If you have a region that is fully capable of maintaining its own electricity using resources such as solar or hydroelectric as well as maintaining its own food supplies, and doing a reasonable job of internal defense and external defense, then there's no reason to believe that such a region won't be able to maintain itself. The places that are most at risk are going to be the big cities that rely on other regions to jam them full of material resources. In scenarios like the bronze age collapse, the code orders were just fine, and even the nation of Egypt continued to bump along, but other civilizations such as the Minoans were completely erased from history for millennia.

I tend to think that the places that will be hardest hit in an apocalypse scenario will be the ones that can't actually sustain themselves. Mortality rates in overpopulated regions will be astronomical since there won't be anything nearby to deal with all of the people to feed. For parallel to that, you can look at the Harappan civilization, also known as the Indus valley Civilization which collapsed leaving basically nothing. That occurred in part because of changes to the climate and also degradation of the soil. There seem to be evidence of the Harappan civilization in the stories of Hindu, which does suggest that somebody made it out alive, as far as I know even today that region is barren and unpopulated.

I don't think we can make predictions as to which currency might be in use. Over the past 8000 years gold has been something that kept its value, but many things that were also considered valuable stopped being valuable. My favorite example is aluminum which was once a precious metal more valuable than gold and today we make disposable drink containers out of it. I tend to think that the Internet functioning to the extent cryptos would need it to is likely a bit aspirational even in a mild collapse scenario as international infrastructure would be the first thing to stop working, since regional conflicts would likely not desire a global network to allow tactical and strategic information to sieve through.