There’s an ungodly amount of nonsense to unpack here. What do you think FedWire settles with? USD, a currency. What unit does the Fed use to maintain its ledger? USD, a currency. A currency is a denominator, not a certificate of ownership you muppet, that’s called a banknote. Visa and Mastercard are payment networks, not markets—holy shit, lol. And yeah, Gold has nothing to do with SWIFT, but under the fiat standard, dollars are supposedly “as good as gold.” Setting aside that statist heuristic fallacy, Lightning isn’t a currency because you don’t settle Lightning on-chain—you settle Bitcoin locked in escrow. The denominator—the currency—is still Bitcoin. Bitcoin is simultaneously money and currency on-chain. The base layer is a monetary system (a network for transaction settlement), and so is Lightning, although they have different properties. The fact that you’re trying to lecture me on money while spouting this clown-tier nonsense is hilarious. You probably skimmed one retarded book on money—probably some Keynesian drivel or Lyn Alden’s half-baked takes—parroting that “money is a ledger” nonsense with zero citations from Mises, Rothbard, or anyone who actually understands the subject. If money is just a “ledger,” then what is the unit the ledger is kept in? What’s being accounted for? A ledger isn’t money; it’s just a record of debts and credits. The money is the unit it tracks, and if you don’t get that, you’re already lost.