> Money can be literally destroyed in a second, without leaving any trace. I disagree. Money (a scalar value) isn’t any more real than energy (a scalar value;

> Money can be literally destroyed in a second, without leaving any trace. I disagree. Money (a scalar value) isn’t any more real than energy (a scalar value; see Noether’s theorem). Both money and energy are accounting devices. Money cannot disappear since it’s not physical. A specific amount of money and its corresponding form (e.g., stocks, 401k, treasury notes) represent a probability that something can be obtained in the future from someone else, conditioned on the social convention that a few numbers change across a few databases. If you burn dollar bills or delete the private key to a Bitcoin wallet, you haven’t changed humanity’s capability to build yachts or conduct medical research; you’ve only changed who gets to influence those decisions.