Bitcoin intended to address an inherent problem of fiat money: fiat money can be created out of thin air, resulting inflation.

Is bitcoin the only solution to this? No, there are lots of alternative solutions, so why the bitcoin heat?

- If you don't like fiat money to store value, you can use securities backed by gold. At least gold certificate is easy to buy here in China, i.e. you have certain amount of gold; the bank holds it for you. Although you cannot buy things with gold certificates, you can easily convert gold certificates to cash and back. There is no storage fee (you can take the gold physically home if you own more than 1 kilo) and the exchange fee isn't too much (my impression is 2.8%, I could be wrong but not too wrong). Besides, banks here competes fiercely for customer to purchase gold, some bank even do it for free for new customers (there is such an ad right before my window). I feel in other places in the world gold certificates are not hard to buy neither.

- If you don't like long time contracts signed with fiat money, you can write it in a way requesting transactions be done in fiat money of the market value of certain amount of gold agreed beforehand. A few people already do that kind of contract, and I presume it is legal.

- If you like, you can manually link your salary account with your gold reserve in the same bank. When you receive salary, convert them to gold in 1 minute with a few mouse clicks.

- I read newspaper report saying in the U.S. autonomy government are allowed create their own currency. It's apparently illegal here in China, but U.S. people can do that. Why not some cities controlled by wise leaders issue their currency pegged to gold, and compete with USD, even in a smaller scale? That's the solution suggested by Hayek in 1976 in his "Denationalisation of Money", what stops this from happening? According to Hayek, if competition is allowed, the more stable currency would easily win.

Somehow I feel all these alternative are not happening because people don't realize the problem with fiat money -- if this is the case, it won't easily change because of bitcoin -- people's minds are slow to change. Had people realized the problem and distrust fiat money, there should haven been rushes to buy gold like it is happening in Asia.