"thrown away to prop up massive company debtloads." This strikes me as unnecessarily reifying it. I can print a $1 trillion dollar bill and give it to you. If

"thrown away to prop up massive company debtloads." This strikes me as unnecessarily reifying it. I can print a $1 trillion dollar bill and give it to you. If we agree that you now owe me $1 trillion, it really doesn't have any effect on anything. It balances, we could repeat the exercise a trillion times, and assuming we both continue to believe in the meaning of that money, it has no effect on anything. The only rational thing for either of us to do is act as though it doesn't exist, even if we totally believe it does exist, because it balances. I can't of course say that nothing bad will happen when people play weird games like this. But the essence of the game that we are aware of, it doesn't make sense to me to be afraid of. It's just writing large numbers on paper (or in databases). If the paper, or database records are destroyed, it's not wasting anything or consuming anything, unless something somehow became unbalanced.