That is how you gain them, one could argue that money is represented as debt notes that countries like, germany, japan, and china buy from us so we can make more money. Also it could be represented by the paper, fabric, electricity, and labor it takes to make $1. But if you ran to the government and said, I want my fair share of what this dollar is worth, what will they give you? What will someone in the bitcoin community give you? They can give you a product, because they believe in that currency, not that it actually represents anything. My father argued about this with me a while back and had said that, well dollars are represented by our trust in the US government, Bitcoin is represented by the trust in the big players.

Take this snippet from wikipedia, "Fiat money has been defined variously as:

Any money declared by a government to be legal tender.[5]
State-issued money which is neither convertible by law to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.[6]
Intrinsically valueless money used as money because of government decree.[1]
While gold- or silver-backed representative money entails the legal requirement that the bank of issue redeem it in fixed weights of gold or silver, fiat money's value is unrelated to the value of any physical quantity. A coin is fiat currency to the extent its face value, value defined in law, is greater than its market value as metal.[3]"

It does state government issued or state issued, but I believe that is due to the fact that crypto isn't that widely known, I do believe this is still covered under this.