We need Bitcoin because it has made a positive impact on our lives and will continue to do so. The problem with regular fiat currency is that governments can print as much of it as they like, and they frequently do. If there are not enough US dollars to pay off the national debt, then the Federal Reserve can simply print more. If the economy is sputtering, then the government can take newly created money and inject it into the economy, via a much-publicised process known as quantitative easing. This causes the value of a currency to decrease. If you suddenly double the number of dollars in circulation, then that means there are two dollars where before there was only one. Someone who had been selling a chocolate bar for a dollar will have to double the price to make it worth the same as it was before, because a dollar suddenly has only half its value.

Sometimes, we don’t want people knowing what we have purchased. Bitcoin is a relatively private currency. On the one hand, it is transparent – thanks to the blockchain, everyone knows how much a particular bitcoin address holds in transactions. They know where those transactions came from, and where they’re sent. On the other hand, unlike conventional bank accounts, no one knows who holds a particular bitcoin address.