A few further points and references on money.

There's the standard four-point definition used in economics:

1. A medium of exchange.

2. A unit of account.

3. A store of value.

4. Sometimes: a standard of deferred payment.

Note that these four functions are given more-or-less in order of significance, and that the great obsession of goldbugs and anti-inflationists , a (stable) store of value, is third on the list and is exceeded by the role as a medium of exchange. Fail in the first role and all commerce stops.

I was surprised that with the emphasis on debt and credit in the article, David Graeber's Debt: The first 5,000 years wasn't mentioned. Well worth reading.

I've found the concepts of modern monetary theory (MMT) to be quite interesting and that they tend to correspond to many of my own views. In particular that money itself can simply be created (or destroyed), that it enters circulation by way of government spending (or central-bank purchases of assets), and that payments which are mandated in a given currency, particularly taxes, but also interest and other debt obligations or mandated currencies (e.g., the U.S. dollar's role as a reserve currency and in global petroleum trade) create a value basis for the currency. That is: people and organizations must pay taxes and buy petroleum, so they must have dollars, so that dollars have value. A point the bitcoinistas seem to have failed to grasp....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

There's some history to the idea that money should be considered to be backed in energy. I'd first encountered it in Arthur C. Clarke's novel Imperial Earth, in which "Sols" were backed in kilowatt-hours. Kim Stanley Robinson uses the idea in his Re-Green-Blue Mars series, and Buckminster Fuller discussed the concept. The earliest reference of which I'm aware is H.G. Wells 1914 story The World Set Free,

As Wells wrote:

The world had already been put upon one universal monetary basis. For some months after the accession of the council, the world's affairs had been carried on without any sound currency at all. Over great regions money was still in use, but with the most extravagant variations in price and the most disconcerting fluctuations of public confidence. The ancient rarity of gold upon which the entire system rested was gone. Gold was now a waste product in the release of atomic energy, and it was plain that no metal could be the basis of the monetary system again. Henceforth all coins must be token coins. Yet the whole world was accustomed to metallic money, and a vast proportion of existing human relationships had grown up upon a cash basis, and were almost inconceivable without that convenient liquidating factor. It seemed absolutely necessary to the life of the social organisation to have some sort of currency, and the council had therefore to discover some real value upon which to rest it. Various such apparently stable values as land and hours of work were considered. Ultimately the government, which was now in possession of most of the supplies of energy-releasing material, fixed a certain number of units of energy as the value of a gold sovereign, declared a sovereign to be worth exactly twenty marks, twenty-five francs, five dollars, and so forth, with the other current units of the world, and undertook, under various qualifications and conditions, to deliver energy upon demand as payment for every sovereign presented.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1059/1059-h/1059-h.htm

Wells dedicates his book to Frederick Soddy, principally known as a chemist (he won a Nobel prize), but also the author of The Rôle of Money, avaible at Archive.org:

https://archive.org/stream/roleofmoney032861mbp#page/n3/mode...

Soddy's economics views, based on thermodynamics, have been criticized by orthodox economists:

"Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12zencey.html?_r=1...

It further turns out that Clarke was quite the fan of Wells, read his books as a child, and kept a photograph of the earlier author in his study in Columbo, Sri Lanka. Clarke's portrayal of money in Imperial Earth also carried strong shades of contemporary politics at the time of its writing, including the emerging importance of Middle-East oil, and the newly-coined term "petrodollar" to describe dollars supported by the oil trade.

Thomas Edison also made some use of the concept.

This history is discussed in more depth here:

"Tracing the concept of money as backed by energy: H.G. Wells, 1914"
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24wyty/tracing...

My own view on money as "backed in energy" is that it has some value, and almost certainly explains much of the actual origins of wealth (that is, total productive capacity), but that money itself while it can be exchanged for energy and derives value from energy isn't the same as energy, and in particular, as a unit of exchange and for settling debts, serves as information and that the ability to inflate (or deflate) currency is in fact a core attribute of it.

My own definition tends toward "demand rights", which can be created de novo by a currency soverign or by mutual agreement (or unilateral choice by counterfeiters), and that of its several uses, facilitating exchange is of utmost importance. Rather than the usual model of money as a bloodstream or flow, I think a closer anatomical analog would be of electrolyte balances or endocrine signals which encourage or discourage nutrient and other uptake by the cells of the body. Excess accumulations of same would be unhealthy in the body, and are for economies as well.