tl;dr, what makes electronic USD "real" is a system of consensus like bitcoin, except it's a node of 1 (the US Fed) with a handful of spokes (banks with Fed acc

tl;dr, what makes electronic USD "real" is a system of consensus like bitcoin, except it's a node of 1 (the US Fed) with a handful of spokes (banks with Fed accounts) for scaling off that base node.