For traditional money, you need merchant acceptance to be useful, so it never goes beyond boarder of a country. But bitcoin is more universal form of money, you don't really need merchants to accept the payment, you can easily exchange to what ever currency they accept. It is amazing that you can exchange it to any currency on localbitcoins, no other currency in the world have this kind of worldwide exchangeability
This isn't entirely accurate. If you could do nothing with bitcoin but convert it to fiat, then it would have low utility and low value. It is only because you can purchase things with bitcoin that it has value. Look at all the altcoins that serve no market function: they're all virtually worthless because the only thing you can do with them is exchange them from bitcoin to the altcoin and back. No one accepts them for any goods and services, so they have no value because they don't serve a function. There's no point to them.
