And yet countries have tamed his "anti-fiat" currency and make virtually all of the advantages of bitcoin useless. Bitcoin basically the walking dead right now.

Fiat currency here is obviously being used to refer to currencies created by government decree.

Plenty of other moneys come into existence emergently, most obviously gold and silver without any authority mandating their use. Money is an emergent property of human society, not a gift handed down by our divinely established kings.

The idea that money can only exist by government decree is patently absurd.

Gold and Silver are not “money”. Money is almost by definition based on authority mandated value.

It’s true that lots of money exists outside of government decree but equating any commodity to be money redefines the term.

That's a dumb take.

Money is whatever thing human society decides to collectively value in order to more easily trade goods and services across time and space.

Money has been and continues to be many things, from government decreed currencies, to gold and silver, to cigarettes in prisons, to sacks of salt paid to Roman soldiers (etymology of 'salary'), to the colloquial "I owe you one".

Money is just debt and favors and can take an infinite number of forms depending on the environment and needs of the people using it to more efficiently collaborate.

I think not quite just debt and favors. In my mind at least the key differentiator is that with money, I can take some money from Paul for some good or service, and expect to be able to get a similarly valuable good or service from basically anyone for that same money.

It's transferable debt.

If I give Paul a loaf of bread and in exchange he writes "Paul owes you one" on a piece of paper, that's money. I can trade that with someone else for some good or service and we'll have to haggle over how much "one" favor from Paul is actually worth.

The dollar is just "the US government owes you one". How much is "one" worth? That's for the market to decide, and largely depends on how much real world goods and services there actually are along with how many "ones" the US government has issued. Although, before 1971, it was explicitly defined as "for every 35 'ones' you have, the US government owes you 1 oz of gold". Now, the value of "one" floats in the market and is constantly devalued by design.

In recent days, the world's markets have decided that "the Russian government owes you one" isn't worth nearly as much as it did last week.

Commodity money like gold or bitcoin don't rely on trust in a government's ability to pay it's debt, but rather trust that a sufficient number of people will always desire the commodity for whatever reason. That's still debt, but more a more indirect, coercion free form of debt.

For gold, that reason is because it has a long history of established scarcity and has some utility as jewelry to signal wealth to others.

For bitcoin, that reason is because it has theoretic perfect scarcity, can be instantly transferred to anyone on the planet with a phone, can be stored in your brain by memorizing the dozen words of your seed phrase, and many other fascinating programmable properties that have yet to be fully explored.

Money has lots of properties and you seem to be struggling to understand 2 fundamental ones.

Money is a) fungible, 2 units of the same money are worth the same thing and b) general applicability. You can use money as a medium of exchange most places.

Brent crude futures contracts are fungible at the monthly contract value. I can literally swap 2 same month contracts with no change in count. I can’t buy coffee with them though (or even Brent crude oil without a lot of toil).

MasterCard debt is generally applicable. It’s spendable all over the world, but I can’t trade it for Amex debt without a conversion.

That makes money status contextual but not undefinable. Rubles are not usable where I live. That means they aren’t money here, I have to fx them, but they are money somewhere else, even places where the government says they are not, like Brighton Beach.

Long story short, you must have external validation of value for something to be money.

> Fiat currency here is obviously being used to refer to currencies created by government decree.

It's a bad term and I fight it everywhere I can.

> The idea that money can only exist by government decree is patently absurd.

No one put forth that idea here. I'm just saying that the idea that there is a non-arbitrary currency is equally absurd.

Coinage evolved from standard weights for bars of useful metals.

That's what ancient coinage is defined as, so I don't see how this is a useful framing.

Shell money predates coinage and works a lot more like fiat money.