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.
