I have known Bitcoin for a while, and I think I understand the value and significance of Bitcoin. But from an economic point of view, I would like to know what role Bitcoin will play in the face of superpowers like China and the United States in the future.
El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as its country's legal tender. Panama, Colombia and Uruguay also seem to be interested in Bitcoin. Indeed, for some countries that have been unable to control their own economic development through macro-control, Bitcoin gives them another choice. When the volatility of fiat currency in one's own country has far surpassed that of Bitcoin, the biggest shortcoming of Bitcoin as a fiat currency no longer exists. This is a success in the history of Bitcoin, but how about superpower?
Now, the United States regards Bitcoin as an investment asset. China allows Bitcoin to be held but prohibits mining and trading. The world's largest and second-largest economies have very different attitudes towards Bitcoin. But as we all know, Satoshi Nakamoto's definition of Bitcoin is "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", and now people seem to be more inclined to define it as a reserve asset or a price anchor. But for the superpower, neither of these two definitions seems impossible. If Bitcoin is used as a currency for daily use, it will undoubtedly destroy the status of the RMB or the US dollar. If Bitcoin is used as a store of value similar to gold, due to the decentralization of Bitcoin, it is difficult to hoard a large amount of Bitcoin together. I am not a student of economics, and Bitcoin seems to be of little use to the current economic system.
I guess that in the coming decades, more and more African or Latin American countries will tend to use Bitcoin as their legal currency, which can help them resist the erosion of the US dollar. However, the Super Congress insisted on issuing its own legal currency and controlling its exchange rate with Bitcoin. I guess that for China, the final result may be to ask the public to hand over its bitcoin to the country and give it the equivalent value of CNY.
IMO, governent and financial institutions wouldn't really fit into bitcoin's nature. These organizations won't just even be put in a sentence because they uphold different principles and nature in general. Bitcoin has a decentralized nature while financial institutions such as banks is the total opposite of it. Meanwhile, government is usually the one against the legality of bitcoin in their country. Hence, asking the role of bitcoin in superpower nations sounds ridiculous to me.
The government, particularly of the first-world countries wouldn't accept bitcoin open-arms like how we want to view it. Bitcoin is often scrutinized nowadays due to the various issues associated with it. That is why most countries aren't really in favor of making it legal on their place. Sure, there are several countries that decided to give it a try and make bitcoin legal, but we can't always assume it would go that way in every country. The government will not allow bitcoin to take over, most especially it has decentralized nature that they will not be able to control nor manipulate because they hate that.