Go further into the past and you'll see plenty. The Opium War was from the terrible twos of mercantilism and metallic standards - the British Empire feared the effects of trading silver for tea and had found a substitute agricultural good - opium. Many empires before then engaged in conquest for precious metals only to either hyperinflate themselves or lose the war. There were accounts of terrible attempts to tame inflation with price controls after the Roman empire seized too much treasure.
The 'fairness' in distribution of money based upon holding is also missing the point on several levels. Not only would that be de-facto regressive it would encourage /not/ investing resources but speculative hoarding which isn't a good thing for the economy. It brings to mind a fundamental misunderstanding that is very common. Money isn't wealth. Money is a medium of exchange for the goods and services which are actual wealth.
It is part of why Bitcoin did so terrible as an actual workable currency - everyone just grabbed onto their Beanie Baby 3.0's and didn't use it for actual exchange and it was very unstable.
Fiat currency is essentially 'superficially crazy/stupid but it works' (it isn't so crazy if one understands the role of money is to be a medium of exchange and is thus arbitrary but can serve the systems for good or ill) and a lot of people get hung-up on it.
"Fewer except for the infamous big ones". If that's what you call progress, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
I'm not sure either part of this is true. The evidence of the 20th century doesn't give much support to the thesis that fiat money helps prevent wars. Nor is it clear that a fixed, or at any rate slowly growing, quantity of money acts as a brake on economic growth. Current economic orthodoxy says it does, but current economic orthodoxy doesn't make good predictions.
> I can understand some unease about the role of the federal reserve but it should have some role even if it is stuck on "try to map to economic growth instead of attempting stimulus or bubble deflation".
You wouldn't need a central bank to implement a policy of "keep the total quantity of money in some defined relationship to the total size of the economy". In fact you wouldn't want a central bank to implement that policy, because a central bank wouldn't give newly printed money to everyone in the economy in proportion to the amount of money they currently hold, which is the only fair way to print money.