A trustless, decentralized public ledger is valuable in and of itself. If you buy a thousand barrels of oil from some Norwegian guy named Sven, being able to pay him, have proof that payment was received within a minute or two, and do so for a trivial cost is quite valuable.
Try doing that with gold and you'll spend the equivalent of $10k USD or more to send armed guards to schlep a strongbox over to Sven. And then you have to take their word for it that the gold didnt get "lost" in transit, and the whole process will take at least a day.
You guys can play your beaniebabies all you want. If sven wants to trade something physical for something imaginary, that's his problem.
decentralzed = needs government funded power grid and government regulated internet to function in numerous different places
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