Location: UNITED STATES.
Age range: 13-120.
Sex/Gender: Men; Women.
Languages: English.
First, the world needs money. "Coincidence of wants" problem. You grow tomatoes. I grow apples. I want to buy some of your tomatoes. But you don't want any of my apples. It's also confusing to try to figure out how many apples a tomato is worth. >>> Money as a medium of exchange. Also it's nice to be able to store you savings (economic energy) in a portable form which is widely accepted. It's nice to be able to work hard now, save some of your earnings, and have that economic energy available when you are too old or sick to work. >>> Money is a store of value. The only problem-- Fiat money is a terrible store of value. Here is what the most successful and widely accepted currency of the 20th and 21st century looks like:
And real estate has its own set of problem: maintenance, dealing with tenants, getting call in the middle of the night, property taxes, etc.
Real estate: Not portable. Not liquid. High fees to make it liquid. Expensive to maintain, insure, protect. Expensive property taxes. What about gold?
There are high fees involved with buying or selling physical gold. Gold cannot be sent via digital communication channels-- Which is essential in our 21st century economy. If you try to trade digital assets backed by gold-- You have to trust the custodian to keep the gold safe and not lie about whether the gold tokens are fully backed by real physical gold. That trust model failed in 1971 and gave us the fiat standard.
Why not just keep your money in the bank? First of all, fiat money (which is the only money that traditional banks accept) is a melting ice cube-- And banks never pay interest rates that are higher than the inflation rate-- So you are constantly losing purchasing power in your savings account, CDs, etc. Also banks cannot be trusted. Governments use banks to try to control what you think, say, and do.
So, it might be nice to have a way to route around banks and pay people directly. In other words: P2P money. If your money can be censored or frozen-- It's impossible to have free speech or freedom to protest government or corporate policies. If your money is controlled by centralized authority-- A government can apply pressure or even take over that centralized authority to do whatever it wants with your money.
Unlike Ethereum, XRP, Cardano, and all other altcoins-- Bitcoin cannot be changed or controlled by a small group of people. It's extremely safe, stable, base layer money.