The Massive Societal Benefits of Bitcoin

Here is a summary of benefits Bitcoin brings in various areas. Do correct me if needed and suggest additions.

Benefits for people in developing nations

• Bitcoin is permissionless, which means anyone with a used $50 smartphone can open an account and start participating in the global economy. Nobody will check your credit history or whether you have a valid address. For example, think of an oppressed woman without the chance to open a bank account in a poor developing country who wants to be self sufficient and live a decent life working online.
• Bitcoin allows people especially in unstable and highly corrupt countries save and thus survive hardships, because you can be your own bank, and you don't have to trust anyone. You can literally cross borders as a refugee if you had to without anything on you, yet carry your savings in your head. This is not a benefit for those living in the comfort of developed countries bombarded with credit card offers, but it's a huge benefit for hundreds of millions around the world who are not as fortunate.
• Bitcoin is independent from nation states, thus free of any misguided or corrupt monetary policy of a certain nation doesn't influence it.
• Legacy remittances services are a huge drain on people who are poor as is already. Such services can easily take 25%+ of people's hard earned little money just to send to their loved ones living in their home country, and the process is risky because people have to carry cash in unsafe areas. Bitcoin fixes this problem.

Benefits for people in developed nations

• Bitcoin has a planned and decreasing inflation built in, so your savings do not gradually lose value as they do in other liquid assets, especially cash. In fact, in the last 10 years it didn't just keep its value but appreciated greatly too. At the same time the USD lost more than half of its value (depending on how you calculate). The USD is the strongest currency in the world, everyone else fared much worse. No, you can't escape this by putting your savings into your house, which is by itself a privileged position to have. Even if your house price doubled in the last 10 years, it's still the same house, just older, and the money you would get for it would be the same or less in value. And if you look at the stock market performance against a reserve asset like gold (not to mention Bitcoin), then you are barely preserving the value of your savings, yet you're already sitting in an asset class that is considered risky.
• Bitcoin is a highly uncorrelated asset with other traditional investment assets like bonds, real estate, stocks and gold, so for long term investors it helps stabilize their savings. Bitcoin is also an international asset, so the pool of buyer and sellers is larger and more independent from the events within a single country than any given national currency. The risk is lower with Bitcoin on the long term. This means investors can afford to take bigger risks with their money which stimulates the economy.
• Bitcoin provides the world's first immutable ledger that can be used way beyond just money. The benefits are far reaching and nobody fully grasped it yet. To start off, think about all the partially corrupted centralized institutions that we have to fund and trust. They all became technically obsolete the minute Bitcoin was created. It's only a matter of time until a more just world will emerge thanks to Bitcoin.
• Bitcoin is the same in any country of the world. You don't have to spend on exchange fees to get various currencies to buy stuff. You don't end up with coins you can't do anything with at the end of your trip. Instead you can top up your phone (or whatever else you need to do) in virtually any country of the world with the same Satoshis (a small unit of Bitcoin).
• You can transfer any amount over to anyone else in the world faster than anything else. You can literally move 100M dollars worth of coins right now for 15 dollar cents. It will show up on the other side instantly, will confirm in about 10 minutes, and it's settled fully in about 30 minutes. No humans involved. Safer than banks. This a huge advantage for businesses. The same transaction with a wire transfer will cost you and takes at least a day or more depending on where you are sending. With credit card payments the full settlement takes weeks.
• You can build entire business models on top of Bitcoin, like for example the Lightning Network payment network, because it's programmable money that can execute instructions autonomously, fairly and safely. You can reduce the cost of middleman which is beneficial to all parties (except for the rent seekers).

Benefits for the environment

• Bitcoin with its second layer solutions like the Lightning Network that offers instant and super low fee transactions that scales to millions of transactions per second can reduce the reliance on legacy financial systems globally. Legacy systems generate about a magnitude more CO2 emissions so any reduction is a huge win for the environment. Remember, the petro-dollar has to be globally enforced by a large military, which is the single biggest oil consumer.
• Once the world transitions to a Bitcoin standard, governments will not be able to print money to start wars as they have done for millenia, thus Bitcoin potentially and likely reduces wars. Wars are the biggest polluting events in the world, way worse than any other human activity, not to mention the immense suffering living beings have to go through. Reducing wars by even just a fraction would offset any carbon footprint Bitcoin may have. This is far down the line though, but still an important end benefit.

Benefits of Bitcoin for those who don't use Bitcoin

• Bitcoin reduces fraud by at least a magnitude or more for merchants. If you ever ran an online store you are familiar with the chargebacks from credit cards, paypal, etc. Losses can be as high as 5-10% of the revenue. This cost is built into the price of products. When we use Bitcoin the losses disappear and thus the cost of goods will drop.
• Bitcoin keeps governments in check passively. Before Bitcoin there was no escape to an international permissionless asset. Now, governments will have to think twice to do something drastic because they know they will only accelerate Bitcoin adoption, as it happened in Venezuela, Turkey and in other nations. This passive force brings a benefit to everyone even those who don't participate in the Bitcoin economy without them realizing that the negative non-event is caused by Bitcoin and its supporters.
• Bitcoin ensures there is a plan B when/if the world's reserve currency the USD may stumble/fall due to uncontrolled hyperinflation, which now became a real possibility given the activity of the FED in the last 2 years. This means society globally will not collapse after the reserve currency collapses, it will just accelerate its transition to a new Bitcoin backed system even if sovereign fiat currencies remain in use. Significantly less people will be fired, go hungry, and be killed by desperate criminals.

In summary, Bitcoin overall and in a historical perspective will likely be seen as a game changer and will have a massive positive transformative effect on civilization creating a much more efficient, equal and just world. All this goodness for recycling ~0.25% of waste energy. I'll take that deal any day.