Money is money

Megan McArdle:

"Hard money" types tend to denigrate the dollar as little green pieces of paper, not a real thing that's actually worth something. This seems to me like a version of the Marxist fallacy, the belief that value can be somehow intrinsic rather than relative.

[...]

weirder currency I can think of offhand is the Yap, who used as currency stones so large that they couldn't really be moved; only ownership was transferred. Indeed, when one was dropped into the sea while transporting it between islands, the Yap continued to recognize it as valid currency, and the family that owned it was viewed as having significant wealth on the basis of this thoroughly inaccessible stone.