OK hypothesis time. People treat money as a yardstick, but the big problem with it is that it changes based on what it's measuring, where, and when, which makes it kind of useless as a yardstick.
Case in point "Musk is a trillionaire". He's sold some stock at a price where, if he sold all of his stock at that price, he'd have a trillion dollars, but here's the thing, people wouldn't buy all of it at that price. The vast majority of the people in the world (and, sadly, only about half the money) would pay nothing for that stock because they need the money for food.
There's a thing that Musk could "give a million dollars to the homeless", like, no, he could only really give a million dollars "worth" of stock to the homeless, which is basically useless because the homeless would need to sell it immediately for food and that would tank the value of the stock.
So, left and right, people don't understand money. So this is the hypothesis: It's better to understand money as a trinity of Money, Taxation, and Regulation.
Money is money, but that money has no meaning without taxes. There's a myth that you need some sort of scarcity to create a currency, but we can see that bitcoin eg doesn't work that way, and a currency very much is inflationary, so it's not scarce. Ultimately the point of it is that the government "handles" the monetary system, that's what you "pay" for with tax.
And the third is regulation. This is monetary regulation, yes, but it's actually the overall regulatory landscape. The milk isn't poisoned, the water isn't poisoned, etc. That's the part that makes people want to live in the country and spend the currency. And monetary regulation means your money is "safe". These three things need each other to work properly.
Now that I say this out loud, I don't think it's novel at all, but I do think that when we talk about money, we talk about it like it exists on its own as a yardstick. It's not, it's all 3 things working together. It's not "a Trillionaire", it's "a trillion shithole dollars for a shithole country".