Yes, but you can hold paper money in your hand, hide it in a book or under your bed or bury it, or you can wipe your as with it. All cryptocurrency is smoke and mirrors. All cryptocurrancy can be filtered out through a myriad of routers, switches and firewalls (none of which you control). In otherwords, someone else determines if the bits and bytes have value AND whether you are even allowed to see or access it.

I can see the writing on the wall. The world will eventually be going to digital $. However if anyone thinks that the banking elites will allow any digital currency but their own may be dreaming. Maybe I'll stick to hard metal. They may try and devalue it but I'll take my chances. However that doesn't mean that I won't play the roulette wheel called the Market with the money I'm willing to lose just in the off chance I win a little.

IMHO, any of these currencies are only worth what a bunch of people believe they are worth. Most currencies today are digital because they are held and accessed through a computer data base. Bank accounts, brokerage accounts, etc. are all in digital form. An online transaction is just that, whether the digital denomination is dollars, yen, or bitcoin. Bitcoin is worth more dollars now than before because a bunch of people (speculators?) have made it so and rest just go along with the game. It's all belief in the end unless something tangible is backing it up like gold, silver, or a Cabbage Patch doll.

Further, the value of the metal in metal coins is a fraction of what it says on the face.

Lower down in the article:
Despite Bailey's objections, the Bank of England said in April that it would "join forces with the U.K. Treasury to consider creating its own central bank digital currency," Fortune reported.