We need to understand trade, both local or international, needs a currency or a form of exchange to make trade easy possible. I hope I don't have to explain that in the current environment a barter system won't work and would throw us back decades or worse. Gold is a nice store of value but physically sending large amounts around the world or transferring small amounts for everyday spending is quite cumbersome. We could just keep track of all transactions, if we could just trust every party to pay in the end....... And even if that was not the problem we would still need to be able to settle the bill somewhere in time.
Since gold is considered too cumbersome we used hard coupled currencies, like the old dollar, that could be settled for gold. But when the US closed the gold window the dollar became fiat, it was only backed up by promises, you could no longer exchange these dollars for gold. We kept using it for several reasons, besides the US being a reliable trade partner and the biggest financial and military super power, the US made a brilliant deal with some big oil producers: they would only sell that oil for dollars in exchange for the US to protect them by their military power.
And the petro dollar was born.
But as all other issuers of the world reserve currencies noticed it's quite tempting to abuse that privilege. Most went down because the issuer inflated the value away. But the dollar has quite a unique position. Due to the mentioned brilliant deal with oil producing countries the request for dollars was allmost unlimited. This gave the US an incredible advantage that they could print unlimited dollars since they where all absorbed by the world market without causing inflation. All countries where just willing to transfere their economic output into dollars to be able to buy oil.
So why are things changing? Well it becomes more and more clear that the US is abusing their power. Both their military power as well as their economic power is used to control other countries. And as long as those actions where used against the overall accepted bad guys all was fine. But recent that power is more and more used to benefit the US only, and also in ways it harmed most other countries and not just the bad guys. With the current power play against China, economic sanctions, the US is harming worldwide economics.
In short the US is using their power and the worlds dependency on dollars in a way that is no longer beneficial to most of the rest of the world. And this is being noticed.
So for some time the world is looking for alternatives as the world reserve currency. One of the alternatives would be a basket of currencies or the International Monetary Fonds SDR's or international draining rights. This SDR is more or less a basket of currencies and thus less dependent on the thoughts/acts (abuse) of one country. But in the end it's still centralized, the IMF, and thus abuse is possible (more or less a guarantee).
And this is exactly where Bitcoin shines, it's decentralized and thus can't be abused by a single party. It is perfectly suited as exchange for local and international trade since nobody controls it. Once worldwide used, and thus after the price discovery and stabilization, it can't be easily manipulated and if a party tried it would be obvious and the rest of the world would act. Money would be only used where it's designed for; an exchange of value, and all political or private goals would be strongly decoupled as should be in a free world.
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