I'm somewhat of a cautiously optimistic skeptic that finds the blockchain stuff really interesting and potentially important (I've been playing with it since 2010), but not super useful at the moment.
I think these are some of things people think about it:
- Your country's financial system is unreliable or run by tyrants and the currency is bad. It might be hard to get a stable currency. Moving income into bitcoin could help you (people were doing this in Venezuela).
- Your country was invaded and crossing the border requires you to interact with corrupt guards that steal anything of value you try and get out. Putting your wealth into a bitcoin wallet can allow you to escape with it intact if you memorize your seed words (there was a story about someone in Ukraine that did this crossing the border patrolled by Russian guards).
- Bitcoin is deflationary, the coins are limited and scarce, but the currency is divisible. This means they should hold value over time. Fiat currencies are vulnerable to monetary policy of governments, bitcoin is less so. Bitcoin may increase in value in part because other currencies are decreasing in value.
- Ability to move money more easily than other deflationary assets like gold (which have other problems). Universal currency across different governments that can be converted into local currency.
All of this is primarily just BTC. I think there are other potential interesting things with ability to have an audit log of immutable transactions of a block chain generally. I think some of the other things are cool (urbit is using ethereum for IDs), but a lot of the other things don't seem to have much purpose beyond being cool. Faster transaction times? The strategy Dai uses to stay pegged to 1 USD is neat.