&gt; Money represents an obligation for society to provide you with something of value.<p>It means that the important part is the obligation and the real value, not the units which get used to track this obligation. Under market-based social norms, if you give someone an awesome massage, then they now &quot;owe you&quot; for it. Perhaps this is in terms of making a website, or cooking lunch, or whatever. The most general form of this is a promise of a favor-not-yet-specified - but that concept needs some unit to measure whether or not you&#x27;re &quot;even&quot; after making that promise.<p>The benefit of this is that lots of people like to receive a favor-not-yet-specified, because it can be turned into whatever sort of thing they need most in the future.<p>In short, that is what money represents - a promise that someone made to provide something of value to whoever winds up with that money.<p>Now, not any old promise will work well, since the other party wants some kind of guarantee that it can be redeemed later for something of value. This is where the banking system come into play: it creates money by convincing debtors to sign believable contracts to pay the bank back. In the past, it used gold and silver. Notes were convertible to hard currency at banks, and there was a general expectation that you could trade those for the things you wanted at a later point of time. But again, it was that expectation that was important, not the note, and not the commodity backing it.