Gold couldn't keep up with commerse and trading outside of immediate trust circles. So then we stamped it into coin. Then people started to mistake the stamp for the metal. Coins hot debased, because it was about the stamp, the fiat of the ruler became the value
It was too hard to secure, so it got centralized with the goldsmith's vault. He became a banker and started writing notes. We confused the notes for the metal and started trading notes. The banker began to lens, just by writing another note. More notes than he had gold, because why not.
So we got debased coins, paper money and debt money. All because gold couldn't keep up with what humans were doing. It wasn't a good enough information system to keep up with the ways we were trying to cooperate as civilization grew.
The real flip to fiat was about a thousand years ago. And we've been increasingly dysfunctional ever since.
Bitcoin is different. Powered by work. No debasing. No lending what you don't have. No double spend. Irreversible. Verifyable. Weightless. As easy to transmit and secure as a secret word. As strong and hard and true as the laws of information. It's damn near perfect money in a world that has never even had pretty good money.
There is no contest between monies. There is only a war between people who want good money and people who just want to keep stealing.