What is money, really?

Do you consider USD money? By wikipedia: "Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts". We can buy or pay for most of the things with usd. It is very universal, and accepted worldwide. USA is one of the greatest countries on Earth. Oil is priced in USD exclusively, and without oil the transportation will halt. No transportation means food will be out of stock in like 3 days. And only if people don't panic and dont try to stack supplies, or else it will be all gone within hours, or minutes. So, generally, USD seems to be as good as it gets. However, it has some weaknesses. For example, fractional reserve banking allows the banks to spawn money out of thin air. Actually, the government can create any amount of money it wishes. The derivatives market, the worlds biggest casino, where banks and investors place bets trying to predict prices, is more than 50 times bigger than the actual market. It is totally out of control, powered by greed and stupidity.

On the other hand, we have precious metals. They worked fine as money for ages, and they are limited in quantity, the government couldnt print it if it needed to fund their deals, so they dont want to use it, and they will not. Currently, precious metals are not accepted as payment, people dont price the goods nor services in gold/silver, so it is not money, at least by definition. Also, silver is very important in the industry, so I am not sure if we want to use it for coins. And of course, transferring true metal between banks would require them to store the metal, not just data bits that might or might not be some day backed by... pieces of paper.

And then we have cryptocurrencies. These are getting some acceptance, but mostly the businesses that accept them configure them to immediately sell for USD and withdraw, and add all the fees on top of the original USD price. Another problem is power consumption. Bitcoin eats up unbelievable amounts of energy, it is not very cheap system. If we try to downscale it by cutting miners rewards, it will get vulnerable for the attacks. On the other hand, in the centralized network you are forced to trust that the administrator will not change the rules unexpectedly.

To sum it up, USD is money, BTC and precious metals are not. That will change, however, one way or the other.