[JumpCrisscross]

> Do you want to buy my synthetic dollars with the price pegged to a dollar?

This describes like half of finance. Treasuries, bank deposits and credit cards all represent to varying degrees “synthetic dollars.”

[pgwhalen]

Yep, and it's not some new-fangled form of finance, it is the entire history of finance. There is a hierarchy of money, and it has always been so.

I highly recommend this Coursera course to shed light on this: https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking

https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking