Bitcoin's 5 Biggest Strengths

1. Censorship resistance. Bitcoin is not owned by any single entity or corporation, thus it can not be censored because authorities are unable to shut down any central servers as is the case with Facebook or PayPal. If they shut down 10,000 miners, they will have achieved nothing, as new miners will spring up and start mining to get a chance at receiving the block reward (currently 12.5 Bitcoins).

2. Global Banking. It is estimated that around 5-6 billion humans do not have access to banking. Financial services are one of the key ingredients in improving people's lives. Bitcoin allows anyone, anywhere with a computer and internet access to set up a bank within their computer. That's right, a bank, not a bank account!

3. Extremely secure. Bitcoin is virtually infeasible to crack as it is protected by a global and distributed network of computers that are solving mathematical puzzles in order to verify transactions. It is very difficult for a single entity to amass that amount of computing power in order to attack the network.

4. It is scarce. The amount of Bitcoins in circulation keeps dropping for two reasons. First, the block reward (amount of Bitcoins miners get rewarded for verifying transactions) keeps halving every 4 years, which means that eventually no more Bitcoins will be minted. Second, users lose their private keys through carelessness almost every day. The Bitcoins held on those keys are gone, forever. These two properties of Bitcoin are the reason why some people compare it to Gold in the real world.

5. It can't be created out of thin air. States hold the exclusive right to mint new currency for very little cost. They sometimes do so in order to perform quantitative easing, which is the act of minting currency in order to stabilize a bear market. Other times they do so just to create more funds for any reasons they have, be it to pay off deficits or funding public projects. In Bitcoin, no single entity holds the right to mint currency out of thin air. Computational work must be performed by miners and verified by the network in order to mint new currency. This ties the price of Bitcoins closely to that of electricity and hardware.

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