Having dollars does prevent Uncle Sam from destroying you and assuming no one wants to be destroyed, everyone wants them. This makes the dollar a pretty good me

Having dollars does prevent Uncle Sam from destroying you and assuming no one wants to be destroyed, everyone wants them. This makes the dollar a pretty good medium of exchange (a short term store of value) but not very good as a long term store of value. Gold is still valuable as a medium of exchange largely due to historical reasons but the problems of moving gold, storing gold and using gold for very small transactions outweigh its benefits for anything other than a store of value, gold is simply too crippled to be used as a currency. Bitcoin aims to fill that gap by having similar properties to other successful stores of value, (durability, reasonable finiteness) along with medium of exchange properties like fungibility, but at the same time being digital and thus adding properties like near instant transfers (on a global scale) and near infinite divisibility. Its not certain if Bitcoin will be successful, something better might turn up to replace it, but IMO a purely digital currency definitely has a future.