[canvia]

I think bitcoin will be incredibly useful in the digital goods economy. Global digital marketplaces need payment solutions that transcend nationalities. If you create an album of music and want to sell digital copies online you should be able to accept payments from customers anywhere in the world using any currency. Bitcoin allows that to happen. If you want to create a video content channel and let people pay a monthly subscription there should not be any type of restriction because of what country the viewer lives in. All of these borders and constraints are artificial and unnecessary in a digital economy. If you want to create a digital service that operates entirely on the internet, why should you be restricted to using a subset of currencies? Bitcoin can be the transaction layer that makes all the human constraints irrelevant. Digital goods also offer essentially no cost of replication so the only real limitation on the size of the digital economy is the number of agents participating in it, which increases daily. The tools needed to create and consume digital products are becoming cheaper every year and more people are gaining access to them globally. IMO the future of the world economy is going to be increasingly digital, and increasingly created by independent producers. Games, books, education, movies, short format shows, PC and mobile applications, web services, photography, art, comics, all will be available to anyone in the world at very low cost and with no necessity for restriction. As I see it the only thing holding back this digital revolution is that consumers are largely ignorant as to it's existence and continue to support antiquated development and delivery systems. I do not think that the rising young generations have this impediment in their habits. What really seems to be missing is a global system for independent content discovery. I'd like to see a universal amazon style digital product aggregation and distribution system that only uses digital currency. The store would provide discovery and distribution (maybe digital currency exchange as well) to a global audience for a transaction fee that beats traditional payment methods. A wiki style product information page that allows users to provide additional product details and translations for localization would be interesting to see (while difficult to moderate).

tl;dr with bitcoin anyone in the world can create a digital product with nearly zero replication or distribution costs and sell it to anyone else in the world basically instantly. That infrastructure exists today but is underutilized.