I think my definition is quite fundamental, and holds true all the way back to the beginnings of finance. We used to just trade directly - trading horses for maize, etc.
But then humans realized that having anything be money is inefficient, so we invented currency as a locally acceptable surrogate for whatever humans value. But it's still rooted in humans exchanging goods and services they find valuable, for whatever reasons.
I tend agree with you. I have a personal definition that allow me to derive a lot of properties with simple game theory, and explain why a gold bar is great money:
money is a "desire" accumulator.
Oh that sounds interesting, I like the idea of money as a desire accumulator. That makes intuitive sense to me. Could you please expand on the implications of this perspective?
I struggle to put it in a succint way without misrepresenting what I think. I will probably write a small blog post about it (Please send me an email, I would love your opinion on it when I do ! contact info in profile).
A way to look at the problem, is to realize that what matters is the ability to make humans do something. ( I won't expand on why that matters).
From there, the other observation is you can probably reduce the reasons humans act to a few affections like fear... desire ( and a couple of others).
I am not trying to explain why we should decompose things this way nor prove anything, just doing a quick exposition. Think of those affections as analoguous to physics fundamental forces.
Having said that, here is a couple of interesting things.
Those primal affections work often together but are not the same. They differ in the kind of social relationships they establish between humans.
Crucially in that framework, debt is not money. It can be used to bootstrap money, but it does not establish the same relationship.
When I say money is a desire accumulator it means that having acquired it, I can rest assured that people will desire my money, and will do things out of their own "free will" to take it from me. That gives me leverage (The sentiment of free will is important for it to work, and correlates with the desire emotion).
The accumulator part is important because it allows to build an economy of desire, to transfer it over time , space and to mix it with other fundamental forces to great effects.
I am not sure what I wrote makes sense without a lot of background
presentation but feel free to probe it !
I think my definition is quite fundamental, and holds true all the way back to the beginnings of finance. We used to just trade directly - trading horses for maize, etc.
But then humans realized that having anything be money is inefficient, so we invented currency as a locally acceptable surrogate for whatever humans value. But it's still rooted in humans exchanging goods and services they find valuable, for whatever reasons.