First and foremost, it allows frictionless transactions. It cuts out a number of middlemen by making them redundant - thus the transaction is more efficient. This means the wealth of mankind grows faster.

commoditization of (international) money transfers

If everyone used Bitcoins instead of printable dollars, then wars would be less common.

Wars are funded mainly from printed currency.

With reference to a number of great posts above, with bitcoin it would also take half the time to develop faster than light speed travel technologies, as compared to the present scheme with middlemen leaching a few percent from every other transaction.

Bitcoin will make governments and central banks and other banks honest. (Yea I know this is quite a stretch)

+1

Maybe a better question is, "what wouldn't be affected by a Bitcoin-based monetary system?"

Yes, bitcoin could effectively make the internet the first non-geographically contiguous country.

also about paypal: yeah Peter Thiel is awesome.  One of the few people in the world who genuinely cares about the future even when caring about that future signals weirdness to others.  He is the biggest supporter of SIAI and supports SENS (people working seriously on friendly AI and radical life extension respectively).

Bitcoin will cause a huge split in the market, and possibly lead to a full-scale nuclear world war, when the Bitcoin block chain on the Mars colony permanently forks from the Earth one due to the 15 to 30 minute communication lag, leading to double-spending, loss of faith in the currency, and vastly increased tensions between two already strained political entities. Satoshi should've foreseen the 10 to 20 minute one-way radio transmission time issue when he designed Bitcoin, and made the block generation either take more time, or have built-in interplanetary redundancy.

(you didn't specify how far in the future)

Very true - also I'm not bought on the inherent problems of acausal universes - sounds like it would be a fun place to live in

Vladimir, I see you've given up on your "reliable UK-based business" tag again - does your sig somehow reflect your view of the current state of the Bitcoin economy? I admit I found it funny to see when you changed it last time with the great influx of new people - possibly to give a more serious impression to potential new customers. What made you change it back now?