There never was any sound money. It's always been a promise.

Money is just "here's a pig, owe me one" in token form.

This kind of thinking is very warm and fuzzy with one or two pigs, and much less so when it's on the scale of billions.

I don't agree. Instead of being between two people, think of the transaction as being between a person and society. Since society offers a lot of different things, you can sell your pigs to society for a token which you can later use to redeem goods and services later. In this sense money is a debt - or an IOU - from society to the holder.

People create money substitutes at will when their central government isn't providing them with a suitable money system. That should give you an intuitive sense that money is always a social relationship.

A bank acts like an internet router but one that transforms the risk relationship. It is not an intermediary that accepts deposits and lends them on. It is an intermediary that acts as a third party to a double sided debt contract where one side owes products and services to the creditor and another side owes money to the debtor.

well, there's like 800 million pigs in the world today as-is, so...

> only solution is to get back to sound money

Gold buggery, now crypto, is an old scam. In truth, sound money has never existed.

And it cannot exist. Value is a subjective measure on reality. Transporting that across time requires work. Expecting to get that transport for free is the perpetual-motion problem of finance.

Gold buggery and crypto may be scams, but the current system where the people with the most money get to issue themselves more money is definitely a scam.

What you describe isn't how the "current system" works.

The largest banks in the US collectively decide things like what the federal reserve interest rates will be. They literally decide how much money they can create.

No, they don't. That's not how it works. Read the PDF.

I did and didn't learn anything new. The big banks make up the federal reserve. The federal reserve sets the interest rates. The interest rates determine the amount of money created. The banks decide how much money they can create.

If you did, it went over your head, because you don't even know what a central bank is. Maybe try reading something more basic first.

Sound, being ephemeral, is pretty useless as money. I'm glad it is gone.

I don't understand what "sound" is supposed to mean in the first place.

From an engineering perspective a debt based system has a lot more guarantees about what will happen to the economy from a stability perspective. There is still the obvious non determinism of not paying debts on time but it sounds like it could be solved by introducing negative feedback so that the system self stabilized toward a desired state.

But this "sound" money thing, it is supposed to work just by sheer willpower alone.