For example not everyone likes shiny things but gold is also compact, protective, conducting, nonreacting, testable, etc.

Wood has a thousand and one uses but it's a bad currency because in addition to being bulky it's easy to make more wood. But in certain circumstances it would work fine.

There is barely any use people can get out of bags of sand, so it wouldn't work as a currency. Salt looks similar but used to be hard to get and is important to food and living, made a great currency.

Bitcoins by themselves don't have value. You could make a hundred knockoff block chains and they wouldn't do you any good. The bitcoin network as an entity that you can trust is where anything useful is actually derived from.