We all know that money has meant different things at different times, to different peoples. For the last 46 years we all have become accustomed to our money being paper, or in the last 20 years or so, digital electrons on a screen.
For something to actually be money it must have immutable characteristics listed in the next photo, a shot taken from Mike Maloney's "Hidden Secrets of Money" series:
Store of value? Most of us would think our currencies today are a stable store of value, and this is because we all live in the immediate moment. We don't pay very much attention to the reduction in purchasing power, because it has not occurred rapidly. The US Dollar has lost an estimated 96% or so of its purchasing power in a little over 100 years. Otherwise, a dollar today is worth 4 penny's as compared to a dollar in 1913. The method by which this reduction in purchasing power is inflation and that is a topic of another article.
See, the founding fathers understood what money actually was and wrote its definition into the US Constitution as silver and gold. They understood the risks of inflation having just experienced the Revolutionary War for Independence and the "Continental Currency" which was hyper inflated to worthlessness.
Little by little we got away from a silver or gold money, had a gold backing in different percentages until 1971 where we went to a strictly floating paper fiat currency system. Our money went from money to currency.
Oddly enough, not one man or woman in a million understand that our current system is based on nothing other than confidence. Confidence that the dollar will always be worth, we'll, a dollar. But what does that really mean?
A dollar today is only worth 4% of what it was only 100 years ago. What will it look like in 100 years? $10,000.00 loaves of bread? $150.00 gallon of gas?
Something different is desperately needed to serve as money, or we can all end up as starving "billionaires," like in Zimbabwe.
The best place to get a good background on what money actually is, check out the "Hidden Secrets of Money" by Mike Maloney.