What if somebody started handing out coupons for Bitcoins. It's just a piece of paper, with security measures and all, saying "If you give this back to me, I will give you 0.001 Bitcoin". If that trend catches on, then we'd effectively have a normal currency, that is backed by something no government can just print arbitrarily, just like all currencies were back when we had the gold standard, whereby money was literally just a voucher for gold.

Now, that does present a tremendous difference to today's economic system, where currencies aren't backed by anything other than the government which have the sole power to print them and of course their economies. Those currencies can then be traded freely among each other. If for some reason the dollar was worth 1000€ tomorrow, then all American investors would buy Euros to invest in things with in Europe, which would greatly increase the value of Euros again and soon the Euro is worth as much as it "truly" is. So if a country's economy is doing poorly, that drives down its currency's value, which then attracts investors from abroad who boost the economy again.

Now, if the entire world only used Bitcoin or gold, Bitcoin is really just a fancy digital version of that, then we wouldn't have that natural equilibrium. Everyone having a single currency leads to poor economies doing poorer, if you don't believe me look at what the Euro has done to Greece, Spain and Portugal, their GDPs are dropping for years.

I made this into a post now https://steemit.com/politics/@politikhos/bitcoin-would-be-a-new-gold-standard-and-maybe-that-s-a-bad-thing