Current financial systems have an enormous amount of reversibility and their security rests on a vast web of relationships (political, institutional, social, ec

Current financial systems have an enormous amount of reversibility and their security rests on a vast web of relationships (political, institutional, social, economic). Understanding your risks in such systems can be hard and high cost for businesses (ask kickstarter about chargebacks). In Bitcoin the risks are much easier to understand since they are technical rather than social: if someone steals your secret key they steal all the bitcoins under the control of that key. This is clearly not great for every use case, but it has some real advantages in certain verticals: 1. automated/machine payments and/or smart contracts, 2. non-reversible payments (preventing investors from backing out of a bad trade at a stockexchange), 3. countries in which the gov currency is not dependable (e.g. Venezuela), 4. paying for services across borders (e.g. Greek internet businesses paying for AWS when they can't wire money outside the country), 5. refugees who can't trust the government not to seize their savings after they leave the country.