How do you mean? Isn’t fiat a definition for physical money?
Discussion
Fiat money is money by decree or aka money. Its a different breast all together from real physical gold or bitcoin.
I’m afraid that’s just not true, since the function of money is to have a centralized backing of value, be it gold, oil or arms, from which bitcoin falls under the money function, as it doesn’t have any independent value of its own, at least not in the real word, as make believe isn’t the solution.
Even as a speculative investment, it’s pyramid structured.
A government pulls out and everyone pays for the party as it was done when the peaks were over, and “crashes” as if Wall Street was, and voila, grounds for war.
At least Wall Street creates industrial value to investors.
The function of money is
1. Medium of exchange
2. Store of value
3. Unit of account
Centralization is not a prerequisite or function of money but a function of fiat. Fiat money or debt based money never allow final settlement of debt so you can't escape trusted third parties and centralization. P2p physical gold and bitcoin provide final settlement of trade. Since its difficult to trade physical gold over Internet without a digital derivative on a trusted party it can't win against bitcoin as a sound money for the digital age.
How is money centralized?
It’s the backing of money that is centralized to justify the value of transactions.
Money doesn’t store any value in its own, but a reflection of the centralized value which is the real transaction value, else all money would have the same value, but it doesn’t, and bitcoin for better or worse, is just money in a digital form, but the transaction value is still the core value of the money gone into it.
It’s not any more difficult to trade gold as it’s to trade dollars or bitcoins over the Internet, but trading commodities doesn’t really matter to the function of money, as money is how the commodities are traded and as long as consumerism is the driving factor, the flaws of consumerism remain, regardless of the form of money.