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Much of economic behavior and dysfunction comes from our poor ability to scale socially past the Dunbar limit. When we can keep up with everyone, we have a little accountant in our head saying who to assign credit or blame to, so our transactions happen without much physical manifestation.

Once you get bigger than a small village you have to believe in the system. The system is, throughout history, a hierarchy, and the hierarchy is defined by an overarching mythology of who or what is good and pure - the religion, nation, etc. - followed by division into ranks and groups. Business and finance becomes part of this system as a mechanism to offload credit and facilitate market exchange. While business and finance can be studied in a technical sense, the way in which humans ultimately use it is socially driven, and market norms vary widely between countries. It's an enormously inexact system the way we have it, because some groups define the rules and others are enforced-upon. That dysfunction lies at the heart of why economies crash, since that allows the elite to live in a Disney fantasy for a while, at least until the rails run out. They can "afford" to ignore society's limits and set up the game to benefit them as long as their status remains in place, and likewise people want to look up to elites as the system in manifest, which is why we have so much fan worship and a sense of national competition.

And so the value of money tends to revolve mostly around the overall validation of the hierarchy as it stands; break that and you break a country. This is a major part of why cryptocurrency incites strong reactions; the beliefs it validates are all premised around consent to some communally defined principle of value(with Bitcoin being an direct extrapolation of labor theory of property to computing resources), and don't have the with-us-or-against-us-by-force qualities of a national currency. That pulls it out of the competing-hierarchies framework in a disconcerting way; there's no leader to assassinate, no bureaucracy to infiltrate. You can, of course, rush in to corner the market that is already there, squash competition and attempt to enforce your preferred hierarchy by dictating the development process - and that is the thing being done at present - but the jury is out on whether controlling it is really possible or if it's going to slip through iron fists like so much sand.