I'm gonna try to condense a whole chunk of a macro class to one thought experiment so bear with me here. Once there were 100 people in the world. Imagine that they found a substance, let's call it unobtainium or UO for short, of which there were exactly 10,000,000 units in the world but it could be subdivided into an infinite number of decimal units. They allocated the units equally, so everyone ended up with 100,000 UOs. They needed to determine what kind of prices they allocated to items based on the number of UOs they had, so, for example, they decided that 5 UOs for a bag of flour seemed fair. A short time later population had grown to 1,000 people, so now on average everyone had only 10,000 UOs. Now 5 UOs for a bag of flour would be exorbitant, so the price for a bag of flour would have to fall to about .5 UOs. And so on until by the time we reached modern times a bag of flour would be .0000.....00005 UOs. We call that continual decline in real prices deflation. It is simply a mathematically fact if you use a currency with a fixed number of units in an economy that expands. Deflation causes very real problems in economies. Lending stops; why would anyone lend money if they ended up with less money at the end of the loan? There's also a significant decrease in purchasing, not only because there is no incentive to lend so no loans available, but also because it doesn't make sense to buy a house when it will be worth less and less each year if the economy grows at all. The only time it makes sense to loan or make investment purchases is if the economy is contracting. So you basically set up a fixed size completely stagnant economy. Which played out exactly as predicted in many countries in the 1930s worldwide depression. And of course all this ignores the fact that I entered this discussion expressly to discuss the energy impact of the mining of bitcoin, which in fact isn't a fixed supply item. It grows just as arbitrarily as asteroid mining would impact gold supply since breakthroughs in computing create gluts of bitcoin and periods of stagnation in computing result in stagnating supply. As far as the other benefits, again I do business internationally and travel a lot. I've never had problems with fungibility of a dollar, confiscation, wiring funds or pulling money out of an ATM literally anywhere in the world, or with my electronic funds (again I stopped using paper money 20 years ago) being counterfeited. Bitcoin is a solution looking for a problem when it comes to all these things which can and every day are solved with modern electronic payment systems. Systems that don't take thousands of TWH of extra electricity or blow up the modern financial system that has led to an unprecedented level of prosperity and economic growth around the world. And that's before we talk about the fact that bitcoin has thus far been incredibly insecure, with massive hacks and thefts happening on a regular basis(see Bithumb, Coinrail, Bitgrail, Coincheck....) , massive government seizures of bitcoin (see Silk Road), and differing values of bitcoin (see what a bitcoin buys you in China vs in the U.S). So it's not even actually a solution to a set of problems that aren't actually even real problems.
Those fears of deflation are debunked with theory and three centuries of historical analysis in Tom Woods' book about the housing bust (Meltdown). The great depression is hugely misunderstood by Keynesians (who happen to be really quiet about all the prior depressions that didn't fit their theory). This is a complete non-sequitur. Lenders could still charge nominal positive interest rates on loans of an appreciating currency, which would be equivalent to a higher positive interest rate on loans of a depreciating currency. You don't understand how bitcoin's difficulty adjustment works. The final supply will be 21 million no matter what happens to computing power. So do you like paying $50 and waiting 5 days for an international wire transfer, while potentially having funds arbitrarily locked by a bank or sanctioned by a government (or "bailed-in" by Cyprus) You can do the same thing with bitcoin in 10 minutes for $1 with zero risk of any third blocking or delaying the transaction. And if you use the right cryptographic tools, also zero risk of any government or other thief being able to confiscate it.
Tom Woods, an activist libertarian with a history degree, versus the entire body of macro economic research. I'll go with the entire body of macro econ research, thanks. BTW, I did an international wire transfer literally yesterday. It cost me nothing because I have a bank that gives me my first 10 wires a month free which is all I happen to need in my personal account. My business account get's more and is similarly never an issue. It hit literally within a minute of me pushing the button, which, BTW, is faster than I've ever had a blockchain transaction go through. I had absolutely zero concerns about it being locked by a bank or sanctioned by a government. None of these "problems" you cite have ever been problems for me over 30 years heavily involved in the financial system. Have you ever encountered any of these problems? And once again, why don't you ask the Silk Road folks how bulletproof their 70,000 bitcoins were when it came to government seizure? It's trivially easy for governments to regulate bitcoin, in fact this year you are going to have to report the existence of your bitcoin stash on your tax return if you're a U.S. citizen. From there it becomes a simple law and rulemaking process to require you to disclose your bitcoin transactions under penalty of going to jail for tax fraud, and as I'm sure you know it's somewhat trivial to track bitcoin if one is so inclined. As I've pointed out over and over, none of these things you seem to think are problems are actually problems for any of us in our day to day life, even those of us with international business. Even if they were problems, the existence of bitcoin in its current form already "solves" them if one were so worried about them that they wanted to use it. So there's absolutely no need to replace national currency with it. On the other hand, there's massive risk to blowing up the world's financial system for something that, if you're honest with yourself, provides you no benefit but increasing the value of your bitcoin stash which at the end of the day is all you're really trying to accomplish here. Start a company, become a better trader, all kinds of ways to make money. No need to put the rest of us at risk so you can make a buck.
So you like paying the 2%/year inflation tax and subjecting your money to the whims of corporations and governments, and not being able to do business on weekends. Silk road got fucked because their security protocols were extremely amateurish. The founder was logging in from a public wifi with no VPN. Govrnments can never regulate the bitcoin network. They can oppress individual users all they want, but the network itself is global and therefore cannot be regulated by any government. Any government that tries to ban or excessively regulate it will just see all their blockchain-related businesses go to a different jurisdiction. The "deflationary death spiral" is a fairy tale that keynesians tell their children to scare them, and it never happened without central banks artificially inflating the money supply in the first place before suddenly shrinking it on purpose. The US in particular saw massive deflation in 1870-1900 at the same time as the fastest real GDP growth in its entire history. Falling prices are the natural result of increasing the efficiency of production. Deflation doesn't correlate with economic decline at all if you look beyond the 1930s.