Bitcoin competes with fiat, so in that sense it could be considered as something that was intended to replace fiat - yeah such replacement might not happen right away, yet you already have stated that even in your own personal journey you gravitate towards accumulating bitcoin and spending fiat, and so the longer and longer bitcoin is around, then the more and more people, institutions and governments are going to realize that they should be gravitating towards bitcoin too... so if a lot of the value is gravitating towards bitcoin, then little by little the inferior currencies are likely to receive less and less use and also to disappear.
Sure governments are going to continue to want to preserve their inferior money systems (control systems), yet they are not going to be able to stop everyone from gravitating towards bitcoin, even though they will try to stop the gravitation of value into bitcoin..and sure maybe they will have various temporary periods of success, yet their possible temporary periods of success still does not justify not gravitating value into bitcoin for anyone who knows about the value of bitcoin sooner rather than later, then the ones who know sooner will benefit more from their knowledge so long as they act to gravitate their value into bitcoin rather than into inferior monies and/or assets... which bitcoin is the apex predator of assets and/or currencies, even if a lot of people either don't understand/realize such fact and/or some people are merely just coming around to understanding/realizing such fact that bitcoin is the apex predator of assets/currencies.
I really love the way you explained, because Bitcoin doesn’t need to overthrow fiat overnight to win. Its dominance grows quietly, block by block, as more individuals and institutions begin to see the cracks in fiat and the strength in scarcity.
What makes Bitcoin unique is that it doesn’t beg for adoption, it earns it. It doesn’t need permission from governments or validation from legacy institutions. It exists, it works, and it keeps working while fiat keeps inflating and eroding people's savings. That’s why people naturally start using fiat for spending and Bitcoin for saving, it’s simply the smarter choice over time.
As you rightly said, governments will absolutely resist this shift, because Bitcoin strips them of their power to print at will. But that resistance is a feature, not a bug, it proves Bitcoin is a real threat to the monopoly of bad money. And while they may slow down adoption with regulations, restrictions, or fear tactics, they can not stop a decentralized, censorship resistant network that keeps running no matter what....
Over time, the people who understand this early and act on it will benefit the most. The longer fiat systems continue, the more broken they become. Meanwhile, Bitcoin keeps doing what it was designed to do, by providing a fair, neutral, and unchangeable financial system for those who opt in....That’s why Bitcoin is not just another asset, it’s the measuring stick against which all other assets are slowly being revalued. It doesn’t compete by marketing, it competes by existing and outperforming. The apex predator doesn’t need to announce itself, it dominates through persistence, resilience, and undeniable utility......