Maybe Econ 101 has changed, but I remember learning that "money" was:
- A medium of exchange
- A store of value
- A unit of account
When we were on the gold standard these were all true. Now that we're off the gold standard gold is no longer a medium of exchange or a unit of account, but one could argue pretty effectively that it's a better store of value than dollars have been, and it's done so for throughout history. (I'm talking time periods of decades, not the post 2008 crisis volatility here.)
The fact that the system we're using now is debt-based rather than based on precious metals should't change the definition of money, however.
