The obvious answer is something better than money. Money is just a vehicle to getting what you value. But as far as money goes, yeah, the American dollar is worthless, it's a sheet of paper, just like crypto is just a bunch of math. Nothing in this world has value unless people think it has value. That applies to all physical goods and services, not just money. If the dollar was backed by lead it would still be worthless because lead is almost worthless. Which I guess is still a step up from fiat. Other countries use the dollar because other people who think it has value will trade it for something of actual value.
No, the answer has to be better than that in my opinion. Money can't ever be controllable by a government or a central power.
Stocks exist to control as much as anything else. People are conditioned to believe stocks are a lot of things and say a lot of things that they don't. The only real rule is money controls the price of a stock. So if you have a lot of money you paint whatever financial picture you want to for people to consume. A company rejects DEI? Make their stock crash. Oh look, investors prefer DEI! Company doesn't want to tow the line? Put out a FUD finance article of questionable merit and crash their stock based on it. The CEO obviously needs to be replaced.
Backing by gold is the old way to do it. Everyone knows what x amount of gold is worth. There is no guessing. If dealing with coins you just need to weigh them to determine their value. If someone can go to alabama and turn their alabama bucks into gold then there isn't really a concern, it's all unified by the price of the underlying asset.
The problem comes from factoring in supply and demand in stocks. If like you say stocks are based on physical assets it would solve a lot of issues, but then how does one value a service? I guess you could use raw income as a method. And stocks for a promising company would run out very quickly if demand didn't keep raising the price. Which would probably still be be better than allowing supply and demand mechanics in a stock price.
I think we're moving to states ""coining"" their own money since the federal government doesn't know what that word means. And I think it would be better than what we have. Agreed.
I'm not sure, I missed that.