Is it any wonder? Any medium-of-exchange immediately becomes credit -- a claim on some unknown-person's future offering of something.
Everything else more-complicated derives from this inherent money-is-a-claim characteristic IMHO.
The medium truly is the claim, aka credit.
You own whatever you exchange your money for, in the simplest terms. Even if it's a bitcoin or a "financial security" or a share or a chunk of gold, or indeed a pork-belly, an iPad etc. etc.
How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0
in particular, see the graph of total domestic debt (i.e. credit) to gdp, and how they have short and long term cycles.
The world reserve currency is the US dollar. Even if a central bank holds gold as a store of value, they price it and their own currency in the US dollar. If any commodity was to be labeled a de-facto 'world currency' it would be petroleum, as it is a commodity that everyone MUST purchase in some fashion.
The monetary supply of the US dollar is determined by the Fed, which has no oversight from or obligation to the countries which that monetary supply affects. It's clear moral hazard, on a global scale.
people would still use fractional reserve lending, and credit. But, no one sovereignty would be in control of the supply of the the medium of exchange they used.
I'm not arguing it would improve anything, but it would certainly be different.
But as JP Morgan said, "gold is money. everything else is credit." Banks don't care about the underlying reserve money as long as they control the credit, which gets used as if it were money.
>but it would certainly be different.
I don't see how. And even if it were, the powers that be like things just the way they are.
But the people doing a lot of the hardest dangerous work get very very lite for doing so. Money is made by pushing buttens at the right time to move numbers around a network.
Same story with bitcoin, though the physical onus is removed.
Yes, and that's probably not going to ever change, not sure what your point was....
But here's where people get REALLY rich. Banks financing government debt (pushing a button, as you say) which is cosigned by 300 million of us serfs, for stupid unsustainable shit like wars and welfare. The banks and credit masters win, and the rest of us are FUCKED.
PS guns and butter was what led to the end of the gold standard. If you think bitcoin is going to somehow stop governments from over spending, or banks from over lending, foreclosing, and buying assets for pennies on the dollar, you need a history lesson.