the whole purpose of using currency is that it has no value in itself
Indeed, the great paradox of money is that the less useful it is economically, the better it is as money. This is why grains and salt gave way to silver and gold, and aided a second stage in the evolution of monetary theory: of these useless materials, the better is that which is best at being itself (i.e. durability).
Paper money, of course, embodies the uselessness property almost perfectly, explaining partly it's attraction. Bitcoin comes even closer to truly useless than any other money so far, not least because economic uses for the others gradually emerged over time.
I don't think you've quite grasped the consequences of this, however: the desired uselessness of money is a true and pure paradox, as it's precisely gold or fiat bill's relative uselessness that made them so useful. Hence why their value was more stable than that of the monies that came before them.
Isn't that the exact opposite of what Nash is saying in his Ideal Money paper? The ideal currency would be of the highest transfer utility and that is solved by linking it to a metric that is publically auditable (GDP, energy efficiency etc) some kind of economic unit would create inflation/deflation scenario's to achieve economic stability through the monetary unit. The uselessness idea is new since the gold standard and has led us to this massive bubble where prosperity has not really been achieved because it has been on on the backs of future work.
Central bank inflation targetting is asymptotically closer ideal than what gold was just because they had the ability to target inflation/deflation gauging econonmic activity, however it is nor publically auditable nor trustless and thus crypto-currency is a better and asymptotically more ideal than fiat today.
Money is conceived and used as a universal good. And that's the paradox: paper with people's faces printed on is universally useless, as a good. It has no purpose. Except as money. Useful, because it's useless.
However, having not read Nash (yes, I'm currently bracing myself...), it's possible that he alighted on a revolutionary idea: that in actual fact, a genuinely universal good (such as energy itself, of which all other goods are patterns of composition) is in fact ideal money. trainscarwreck?
