There's a kind of deadweight loss that exists when an economic exchange can't be fully peer to peer, anonymous, or without a paper trail. We often focus a lot on how to replace normal fiat transactions, but there are so many cool, entirely new things you can do with BTC.

Essentially, whenever you have reservations or artificial barriers in place for completing a transaction, Bitcoin enables a cut-and-dry value exchange, minimising or even erasing this deadweight loss. No tracking, no security leaks, no authority breathing down your neck, no middle man taking a cut or dictating terms, etc.

First of all, you can buy things online without creating an account, sharing card info, etc. That in itself removes a pretty significant attack vector in case of data breaches.

Several times my CCs have rejected random payments, whereas no one or nothing can stop me from paying a Lightning invoice.

You can pay for completely private and encrypted AI inference, where no one but you sees your input / output.

Other necessary privacy infra, especially VPNs which are seeing massive pressure from governments recently, can now be accessed more securely and anonymously.

We have completely anonymous and censorship-free tipping, crowdfunding, etc. to prevent cancel culture or regulatory burdens from silencing controversial projects, individuals, protests, etc.

While obtaining non-KYC Bitcoin is a challenge, Lightning is fairly private for payments. There are even better privacy solutions that integrate into Lightning as well, such as Fedimint or Cashu, although they have a temporary custodial tradeoff in order to achieve premium privacy.

I think over time as we continue to build out the Bitcoin economy's infrastructure, more and more of these use cases will become apparent.

I'm interested to hear others' thoughts on potential areas where paying with fiat is untenable but would be viable with BTC.