Money is not essential to capitalism. It's just a way to delay the purchase of capital or inputs to capital, until a later date, making commercial interaction more efficient by abstracting away the pressure of time. That is why hard money is more valuable; it keeps its worth better over time.

Capitalism started with humans. "Those durable produced goods that are in turn used as productive inputs for further production" are what keeps us alive, even in unfriendly climates and when food has become scarce. It is part of the natural state of humans and that is why (primarily) the male/father of the species is preoccupied with building useful things that are used over and over without being consumed, like shovels, digging sticks, slings, knives, or storage sheds and containers. That is ingrained behavior, not something that arises out of the environment. Other animals also do this, but nobody does it like humans do.

Communism was an attempt to sever valuable capital from the producers who knew how to use it most efficiently, and redirect it at consumers, with the idea that the consumers would all magically turn into equally-efficient producers because they were only being held-back by lack of capital. Instead, everyone starved and the machines rusted. Like in Zimbabwe, after the land grabs.

Much more effective has been the post-communist focus on education and training, to create more producers, and those producers then seem to find a way to get the capital that they need because they have the lever that other people want them to produce and will pay them money for it and ensure they get the capital that they need to get the production done.

Bitcoin and other digital monetary transactions have lowered the "pay them money for it" friction down to "tap the screen of your cell phone", but only Bitcoin can resurrect capitalism in the medium term because it's the only money that is both digital and extremely hard.