All her life my Aunt looked like she was on top of her business. Owned multiple houses around the world, travelled regularly, lived in the inner city of a top tier European city. She was found dead at home in her 70s. As the finances were unwound to deal with her estate, she's flat broke, everything was loans on loans, her sister who rented one of her apartments is set to lose her housing. One of my family members commented "I thought she was good at business", I replied that she was, she died without ever having to clean up the mess she made, her finances were a disaster and now they're someone else's problem.

The Bible warned about worshiping money two thousand years ago but you all want to bitch about magical sky wizards

People stopping believing in religion doesn't affect much. People stopping believing in money would collapse countries/the world. That alone will keep people believing in it. At the end of the day I can really take money and get real food with it, no matter how fake you claim it is.

Fundamentally money is just fancy IOUs. You trade bread for eggs. One day the neighbour broke all their eggs so they give you an IOU. You don't really need more eggs at that time so you give another person the egg token for some milk. He can then go get eggs.

That's all money is. Transferable, universal IOUs. And if you think about it, there doesn't need to be a limit to the amount of IOUs in existence. Yes, it's all built on trust and promises, that the egg farmer will honour the token and give you the eggs, but the IOU is just a concept, nothing needs to physically exist for the IOU to be valuable beyond the idea it will be followed through on.

So to me, it doesn't matter if money is "imaginary", because that's kind of the point. The only reason we ever had something backing it was to ensure the person could actually follow through with the IOU they gave out. Because if the chicken farmer gives IOUs out en masse so that they can get a bunch of stuff from their neighbours immediately, they're gonna have a problem if everyone comes to claim them at once.

But if you're happy to accept the idea he can eventually make good on it in some way, and the people of the village all agree to it, there's no reason he can't do this and give out the eggs over time. The fact it's built on trust doesn't automatically make it not real.

That said, there's definitely valid concern about how speculative bubbles and extreme wealth concentration can distort the system. But that's a problem with how the IOUs are distributed and manipulated, not with the idea of money itself.

And honestly when we look at the scale of the world today, what's the alternative? You want to go back to trading? How is that going to work for obtaining a TV, smartphone, internet? A variety of foods? Etc etc etc. I'm interested what alternatives could exist for a global or even national market.

I realised a long time ago that economics is a faith based religion. And I'm an atheist.