Bitcoin has just one advantage, and it's not minimizing transaction fees or anonymization. It's just that it's decentralized. The big breakthrough with Bitcoin over other distributed systems is that it prevents double-spending. That's what all the mining is for: a node verifies every transaction and then cryptographically signs the result. So you get all the benefits of a decentralized system - you don't have to trust any single source of truth, and transactions are publicly auditable - without the biggest downside they usually have.