Quote from: Impulseboy on August 08, 2018, 11:43:41 AM

If everyone around the world gets into cryptocurrency, do you think it will even help in solving or lessen socioeconomic problems? Can it be used to buy goods from other countries? It is fair to say that crypto will help a lot of people but what will it do to one's country? Will it help improve a country's economy?

Bitcoin solved a number of problems across technological, social and economic dimensions.

Technologically, Bitcoin introduced a novel and effective way to address a few serious and critical weakness in using computer systems to act as a monetary system. These are

- that computer systems allow (by design) the ability to copy and paste (duplicate / counterfeit) digital / electronic monetary units in an unregulated way

- computing operates at the speed of light, and thus could be used to re-use / spend the same unit of money multiple times across different transactions (the double spend problem), as well as not follow through on an agreed transaction (the Byzantine Generals dilemma)

Socially, Bitcoin is offered as an open source solution, incentivising people to try, learn and use the underlying technology to develop and build their own alternative system (or simply clone the original). This model ensures that there will always be demand and interest in the system.

Economically, Bitcoin was cleverly designed to operate as a deflationary precious commodity / asset. It was designed to simulate the finite quantity of precious metals (like Gold) by setting an absolute maximum amount of 21 million bitcoin units. There is also a mining reward mechanism - a payment in bitcoin - designed to generate rewards to active participants approximately every 10 minutes, with reward quantities halfing at pre-defined intervals. This approach ensures economic predictability of the bitcoin asset, and creates deflationary incentives for people to own and hold Bitcoins (since they should be worth more over time), thus also rewarding long term participation in the Bitcoin ecosystem over time.

Others have answered the question and outlined some specific real world problems and use cases that Bitcoin has been used for, so I wont go into detail about how its used.

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