"How do 'good money' and 'bad money' differ, if at all, for the valuable function of facilitating utility transfer?" ... if we consider contracts having a relatively long time axis then the difference can be seen clearly.
Consider a society where the money in use is subject to a rapid and unpredictable rate of inflation so that money worth 100 now might be worth from 50 to 10 by a year from now. Who would want to lend money for the term of a year? In this context we can see how the "quality" of a money standard can strongly influence areas of the economy involving financing with longer-term credits.
And also, if we view money as of importance in connection with transfers of utility, we can see that money itself is a sort of "utility", using the world in another sense, comparable to supplies of water, electric energy or telecommunications. And then, if we think about it, we can consider the quality of money as comparable to the quality of some "public utility" like the supply of electric energy or of water.
What seems interesting, aside from the obsession with the significance of money in relation to contracts, is that seemingly we are finally stating to understand money in relation to telecommunications like this very old lecture.
You see, I get accused of things such as only thinking of bitcoin as a money. But I think largely as a whole we have a giant block to the obvious reality of the mechanisms we are creating "socially":
This memorandum concerns some ideas for new designs of the control system in high-speed digital computers. The ideas are yet in an immature and rather unspecific form, but this is a subject that deserves some attention and thought for the future. Indeed the idea is more or less futuristic and is more appropriate for the "electronic brains" of the future than for the computers now used, or under construction, or even planned. The basic idea is simple. Instead of having a single control unit sequencing the operations of the machine in series (except for certain subsidiary operations as certain input and output functions) as is now done, the idea is to decentralize control with several different control units capable of directing various simultaneous operations and interrelating them when appropriate.
We are still nowhere near the realization that Dr. Nash (then just J. Nash I suppose) had starting from the time when he proved the value of money to our society with "the bargaining problem". The letters to the NSA
https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/nash_letters/nash_letters1.pdf The significance of this general conjecture, assuming its truth, is easy to see ... As ciphers become more sophisticated the game of cipher breaking by skilled teams, etc, should become a thing of the past.
He expresses a realization that didn't get (officially) implemented until Szabo posted the paper on the dawn of trustworthy computing. Shortly after "the bargaining problem" and the letter to the nsa, comes the realization of Ideal Money, when fleeing to Europe and trying to exchange the USD for the Swiss currency (better quality). The Navy brought him back in chains.
All of these things together, create a machine and technology we still haven't come near realizing yet, either in the physical world or the mental, but the entire infrastructure has been mapped out for over 50 years, and a near complete design has been proposed for nearly 20. What we seemingly forget is this is the natural evolution of our civilization, AND these things have been in plain view the whole time....
"Satoshi" hides from the people, not the government. None of this is hidden, we just refuse to see. Which of us has read all of this? Are we sure this is insignificant and unrelated? Are we grateful to Satoshi?