Wilsoniumite

Hey I hate myself just as much as the next person, and yet, I really need someone to just read the paper or I will lose my mind.

As someone who works at a financial institution, this is a really refreshing and concise breakdown of money and monetary systems. I think the most important thing that people should realise from reading this is that none of the things we have in our monetary systems were dreamed up for no reason, each solves a clear problem, and often was found by multiple independent groups of people at different times. I absolutely love the fact that it's essentially just layers of trust, analogous to a certificate authority or a domain name system.

And, of course, that the top level of trust is a bit arbitrary, and that "black money", of course the US Dollar, isn't worth more than trust in the US government.

not really, the unconditionality is kind-of a requirement. Pay people to not work and you skew in favor of not working, pay people to work and you skew in favor of working, pay them for any other condition and, well, it's skewed, or in economic terms, distortionary. You can still have conditional benefits on top, favor working or something else a bit more if you want, but the base needs to be unconditional.