[hjrnunes]

The reason banknotes are worth anything is because you need them to pay taxes and fees to your/a sovereign.

They literally entitle you to pay the corresponding amount of taxes and/or fees (e.g. for market transactions) to the sovereign, which you cannot pay otherwise.

Hence why they are not mere pieces of paper with ink anymore a stock share or bond is: they're titles - the value is in what they entitle you to, not the physical substract they're on.

Bitcoin doesn't entitle you to anything other than creating a new ledger entry in the distributed ledger book that is the blockchain. Except unlike most ledger books, the Bitcoin blockchain does not record transfers of actual property between parties - it records the transfer of abstract numbers (which cannot be property in and of themselves).