So bitcoin, but without calling it that because of the political implications.
I started Intercoin in 2018 to try to fix this. Let every community have its own coin, and Intercoin acts like the internet of coins... interconnecting them. We raised about $1M, and built the system, but we couldn't compete with the zero-sum games and scams in crypto, because investors and even "crypto VCs" wanted to just 10x at the expense of everyone else. And also regulators don't actually allow creating fake volume, which is table stakes to be listed on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko and taken "seriously" by crypto investors, so it instead became a business where we go town by town, community by community, influencer by influencer: https://intercoin.org/currencies.pdf
I've interviewed lots of economists from different schools of thought, such as community currency economists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXTn52kL0Yo
I've also interviewed regulators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0
And also founders of decentralized networks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
And there's a lot more resources on https://community.intercoin.org that discusses this stuff. But Intercoin kind of failed as a "crypto" project, because we were unwilling to stoop to what projects did in order to attract capital.
Some communities will do better than others, but when they start running out of federal dollars, their local currency will ensure people can still eat, and plumbers will still get off their ass to fix leaks.
"Wildcat currency" was indeed a lot more unstable before the US blew them out of the water with "the greenback", which was issued to finance the civil war, backed by land taxes and tariffs, and then they passed laws making it "legal tender" for all debts, even the private ones.
Banks have been working with the US government hand in glove, if credit money is the vast majority of our M2 money supply, where do you think all that new money comes from that enables people and businesses to pay back all the loans with interest? Who do you think bails out those banks and forces them to buy treasuries? and so on.