So is money that's commodity - like gold or silver - really the best way to do money?
It can be decentralized, and could reduce or eliminate inflation.
From my own VERY LIMITED understanding of economics, it's all about the perception of value versus the reality of value.
Back when everyone used the gold standard, wealth was an
absolute. You were as rich as your property. No more, no less. This imposed an absolute wealth cap on the world. It was a system that more or less killed the Roman Empire dead, after the Emperors began bribing their armies with
literally a significant percentage of all the precious metals in circulation at that time and as a result were forced to debase the coinage until it had 'less gold than seawater', as Terry Pratchett would say.
Freeing the world from this system enabled a nearly-unfathomable increase in human productivity. Why? Well, there simply wasn't a practical way to make the average person rich before. Wealth was not accessible to regular people, due to them having to both acquire it physically and then protect it from being stolen. Plus it was inconvenient. Let's say you give a solid gold bar to a smelly peasant. You've just made them immensely rich... but you haven't actually given them any way to
utilize their wealth at all. What's he going to do; shave little bits off with a knife and use them to pay for food, furniture, peasant stuff, etc? No, he's going to stick it in a hole somewhere.
On the other hand if that peasant has a credit card and you deposit that gold bar in a bank, then let him load the theoretical value of it into his card, you've just given him the flexibility to utilize his wealth in any way he sees fit.
Of course, that instantly introduces the issue as to what happens to that gold bar if 10,000 people try to cash out 10$ each of it's, say, 100,000$ value. What's the bank gonna do, shave 10$ worth of gold off it until it's gone? No, of course not.
Thinking about this for a moment opens up a lot of immediate logical questions and conundrums that economists have grappled with/sought to brutally exploit for centuries.
It is also why there are people out there who sincerely believe that we are ruled by alien lizards inside people suits. Not all of them are idiots. No, they've been people just intelligent enough to grasp the basics of systems like this, but not dedicated/bloody-minded enough to grasp all of its intricacies or internalize all of its contradictions.
To these people, it is genuinely easier and more logical to believe that bankers are alien lizards than actual humans.
I do not blame these people at all.