Money is whatever people agree it is. Printed pieces of paper or recorded bits in a database are no more inherently valuable than digital tokens, yet everyone accepts them as "money". AI faces are no surprise, but I fail to see the connection you are going for.
Because the government backs the dollar. The government doesn’t back runescape gp for instance. It has value yes but its also not money. Otherwise anything one could trade could count as money. I traded my couch for beer now its money if we only defined money by having some value and ability to trade it.
> Otherwise anything one could trade could count as money.
But that's correct and often occurs on black markets for all kinds of reasons, for example coffee and cigarettes in Germany after WW2 and Hungarian salami and tires in the GDR. There are no alternative currencies because they are strictly prohibited by penal law, otherwise they would occur in all kinds of areas. Governments only allow highly regulated alternative currencies, and even then only under very rare circumstances. Crypto coins weren't an exception to this, they only emerged a bit faster than how legislation could be updated.
