It credits the agent for the fishermen with the money to buy the rabbits and it credits the agent for the hunters the money to buy the fish. As the exchange takes place, the money is no longer needed for that purpose and the agents of the fishermen and hunters liquidate their debts at the bank. The bank does keep a small portion of the fish and rabbits for the service it renders. The bank does not immediately see the fish or rabbits, which the agents sell to their customers, turning the cash received over to the bank as payment. The banks' owners and employees actually may spend this money on the fish and rabbits when they shop for dinner or dine out.
Gold still is held by governments around the world as a monetary asset.
There is too little of the metal to serve as a circulating media, with which we could pay for big-ticket items. It is so dense that if it all were put in one place it only would be able to build the bottom third of the Washington Monument or the first three feet of the Empire State Building. For most of U.S. history, the legal definition of the dollar was its exchange value in a specific weight of gold. For the first several decades of our history, the definition also included silver, which meant you could take silver to the mint and exchange it for Treasury's paper dollars or you could take gold to the mint and make the exchange. In the Civil War, the dollar's definition in terms of precious metals was suspended as the costs of the war mounted and the government had difficulty raising funds through bond sales, having to pay higher and higher interest rates.