Merchant-generated and backed credit notes are how we traded before 'money'. We go back to that.

The premise and etymology of 'money' gets us stuck thinking There Can Be Only One. When there's only One Money in a system, you have a massive single point of failure. It's an awful design. When Bitcoin's price changes, ideally (in your view) billions of people would be affected all at once.

Not so in a system where everyone holds credit with dozens of merchants. When one merchant goes under their own credit hyperinflates - and nobody else's. This whole idea we need to yolk all of society together under One Money so they can sink or float all at once has to go.

Massive decentralization is the way forward. It isn't difficult to run a traceless credit system. That's how the world worked and survived tyrants; when you 'break even' the ledger is smashed into a million pieces. Bitcoin is the opposite of 'traceless', it forces your transaction into a permanent ledger.

Pear Credit had the right approach (no blockchain, no permanent ledger, no transaction costs) but the project was announced by the Tether team in Nov 2022 and immediately memory holed. I am Jack's lack of surprise. cashu seemed to have hit on the same approach but couldn't help chaining itself to the block (or he's just rebranded to appeal to maxis, I can't figure out of it's still usable without the blockchain).