I like Nate Hagen's idea that money is a claim on energy and materials, and his contrarian opinions about what scarcity will do. This means that geopolitics plays a large role. Being able to find the nonce that makes zeroes in front of the hash and run a decentralized network of nodes that can do Merkle trees and communicate with timestamp servers means less than finding and securing energy and materials with superior warfaring. In other words, debt can be balanced by securing rights to oil and minerals. (Disclaimer: What is isn't what I think it ought to be.) https://youtu.be/ucBSohkzBWw