Re: Catchy name
Currency hasn't been physical for a long time.
You think your money is real because it comes in little bits of paper or coins of negligible metallic value? That's not money. It's just a convenient way of counting it. Money is an abstraction - it's valuable because there is a widespread agreement that it is valuable, which lets you spend it to buy things of actual utility. Or because the tax collector will send men to arrest you if you can't supply enough of it.
If you look at a bank note you'll find a notice on there: "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of x pounds." That's a relic of where notes come from: They used to be an indicator of debt. You'd give the bank your bag-of-gold and they'd give you notes for it. Very handy things, as gold is bulky and heavy. The notes were as valuable as the gold because you could always take them back to the bank and have a legal guarantee that they would return said gold, and you could trade the notes in lieu of the gold. Then over time the actual piles of gold in the vaults were accessed less and less often, until it was possible to do away with them altogether. That's where we are today: Money is a shared fiction, but simply having enough people act as if it's real can make it real.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
