Re: Bitcoin discovers can't have cake and eat it
"Money has always been intangible"
Go back and reread your history lessons. Modern *fiat*(1) currencies, by definition, are intangible, and coins and notes are just physical representations, as you say, but of the currency, not a commodity.
However, historically, either the physical coins and notes were representations of a tangible good - the "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five pounds" meant, historically, five pounds of silver, at a time when a pound coin was made of a pound of .925 ("sterling") silver, or they *were* the good in question. The silver in that pound coin (there are examples in a museum in the centre of Oxford - it is an effing big coin) *is* the currency, not a representation of the currency.
It is only later that people started to make exchangeable currency, where the physical currency represents a quantity of the relevant commodity (silver, gold, blocks of salt, cowrie shells, future tax revenues, whatever) rather than being the commodity, and it is only much later still that we finally abandoned that idea.
Much later.
Like, try 1971.
(1) The phrase "modern fiat currencies" contains a redundant element. All modern currencies are fiat.