I agree that people assume bitcoin has no value because it's not tangible, yet they have no problem regarding fiat currencies as having value even though they are now mostly digital. A currency does not have to have a paper asserting it is approved by a particular government. I think it's the assumption that a currency needs to be government backed that drives this belief.
That's a good point. Many people equate tangibilty with something having real financial value or not. Others think that something can only have value if its value is validated by the government. But the truth is none of these things determine the value of something. Only each person can decide if something has value, and how much value it has. And that's how everything is valued in the financial world.
The government validating the value of Bitcoin goes against the notion of why Bitcoin was invented in the first place: To have a type of money that the government can't tamper with its value with.
It's quite interesting that people keep on claiming that Bitcoin is somehow not real.