The buzz around Bitcoin continues. You cannot read a newspaper or blog without news, developments and investments in this most famous of crypto-currencies being mentioned and dissected.
Bitcoin evangelists like Max Keiser and Jon Matonis have been touting a range of benefits that they say this new form of money will bring. These range from more efficient remittance around the world, more instant payments and sounder money less affected by inflation.
However, there are also a number of benefits that Bitcoin could bring to the world that you might not have heard. Many of these can have a positive impact on your life.
Enabling the protest movement
You might have heard the story of the random spectator at an American televised sports event, who held up a placard saying 'Send me Bitcoin!' with a QR code.
Well, he received over $25,000 worth of Bitcoin in 24 hours, all from people that didn't know him from Adam.
The point of this story is that people with media attention can make requests for your support and if you identify with them you can send them money and help finance the protest like never before.
The potential for popular causes to use Bitcoin and crypto-currencies as a way to rapidly crowd-fund their way forward is very interesting.
Imagine in the Arab Spring activists or Libyan rebels had been able to finance their movements like this? In a future where Bitcoin is readily accepted all over our local streets, such protests could finance and feed themselves in new ways.
Bitcoin might offer similar protest movements like Occupy, the Tea Party and green campaigners new funding and growth channels too.
Bitcoin's incredible property as an instant medium of exchange allows the crowd to democratically support and fund causes they care most about, with far less effort. Application forms for charitable giving are a thing of the past.
No more SPAM in your life
Imagine a future with no more SPAM.
No I don't mean the canned meat product, I mean annoying emails, texts and the like which constantly jam up your inbox and mobile and generally irritate you.
We all spend hours getting distracted by and deleting this SPAM.
However, if future email and social messaging systems only accepted incoming mail when it was linked with micro amounts of Bitcoin, spammers would suddenly find it a whole load more expensive to automatically hit millions of inboxes.
By involving micropayment in the sending and receiving of mail, genuine communications from people you want to hear from can still get through whilst other rubbish gets filtered out.
Digital marketers currently use applications like MailChimp and CampaignMonitor, which charge users rates like one US cent per email they send when hitting their newsletter lists. Bitcoin and digital platforms could take this idea to a far wider level, whilst pricing spammers out of their irksome ways.
I certainly look forward to a time where I don't receive dozens of emails a week from would be scammers, spammers and out-sourcing companies I've never heard of.
Fewer ads on your daily read
Another area where Bitcoin can add value to our internet-centric lives is improving the media and publishing business.
We all have our favourite sites for getting news and these are generally grouped into paid subscription sites with pay-walls or free sites littered with annoying paid ads.
So often this is the dichotomy within publishing on the internet today. Either fully paid up, premium reading, or free to read sites, which have to find revenues from other channels.
However, with Bitcoin micropayments, sites can charge minimal amounts to consume their content, offering a new revenue model for online news hubs.
I'd happily pay a few pence here and there for reading my favourite blogs and newsites. Not only can paid ads be annoying, the behaviorally targeted ones give away my unhealthy lusting after fast cars, road bikes and holidays. This is a grave danger for men researching wedding rings and women checking out presents for their man too by the way!
Any other esoteric benefits of Bitcoin?
These are just a few of the less well understood benefits Bitcoin and crypto-currencies could bring to our lives.
The liberty loving part of me rejoices at the potential enabling of new protest and progressive movements, whilst the grump old man would appreciate less email SPAM.
We're still in the infancy of Bitcoin and the crypto-revolution and as we move forward trial and error by millions around the world will reveal thousands of more quirky and helpful uses.
Got any more little known benefits of Bitcoin to share? Leave them in the comments below.