And, indeed, this is surely not correct:
The purpose of money is to facilitate barter by splitting the transaction into two parts, the acceptor of money reserving the power to requisition value from any trader at any time
Money is first and foremost an institution, and as soon as we start talking about "the purpose" of an institution as a first principle, we are not talking about the empirical institution itself, but entering into the institution as participants and trading folkviews regarding the institution.
And when a work is so deeply entrenched in the monetarist fairy tale approach to the historiography of money as to say:
Civilization began with exchange, and exchange began with whole barter. Whole barter means the exchange of things for things, with each transaction complete in itself.
Civilization began with Cities, and Cities began with Big Men (priests, kings, whatever) redistributing taxes collected in kind. The first money were receipts that stood as proof of payment for those taxes.
And, yes, literally tokens, and yes, of course, obviously, with no value independent of the system of relationships where the information content of the token had meaning.
Barter is a fine thing to get luxuries and other status goods ... because, after all, if you fail to get the luxury or status good, it just means that the Joneses get ahead of you, when you would rather keep up with the Joneses.
However, for staples, reliance on barter would be insane. For staples, the problem of the dual coincidence of wants is not a minor annoyance that can be worked around for a century or decade while waiting for one of the items being bartered to emerge as the medium of exchange ... its a problem of, if nobody who has cereal grains wants what you have to offer, you starve then die.
Even worse is the following form of argument:
The total of 176 answers to the 22 questions showed such contradictions, inconsistencies and disagreements that we feel it a patriotic duty to state that there appears no understanding of the subject of money among the contributing authorities or among others whose writings we have studied.
Now, if you take several chartalist theories, of whatever quality, and several quantity theories, of whatever quality, and throw them into a mass, it is certain that that will be a mass of confusion and contradiction, because there are fundamental premises upon which the two groups of theory will disagree, and both groups cannot be simultaneously right.
But that can not be used to disprove the validity of each and every theory in the mass. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
ie a time delay between two "legs" of a barter exchange.
1/ I accept your IOU against value now.
That is the first "leg" of a split barter transaction.
2/ I then exchange your IOU for something of value from Migeru.
That is the second leg of the "split barter" transaction.
This all takes place within a "monetary system" which requires a "Value Unit" and a legal framework, and of course also some means of guaranteeing performance in respect of IOU's...
We currently achieve money/split barter by accepting Bank issued IOU's as "Value" (when in fact they are claims over Value or "anti-Value"), and in fact banks' economic function is as "guarantee providers".
These implicit Bank guarantees are not backed 100% by Value = "money's worth" (as yours and mine are - ours are ultimately backed by our earning power, or by something we "own"). They are actually backed by maybe 8% of "Value"= Capital which is an "in-house", or proprietary "default fund", the extent and nature of which is set by banking regulators - the BIS in Basel.
I don't think Banks as credit intermediaries are either necessary (the internet allows us to bypass them) or sustainable (compound interest on money created as debt is mathematically unsustainable).
If we can back a mutual guarantee with a provision into a mutually owned (held by a "custodian") "default fund" the result is Banking without the Bank as credit intermediary.
But that will actually be great for the Bank because, in this model, a bank operates without putting its capital at risk. It is now a pure service provider managing the creation of credit by setting "guarantee limits", rather than "credit limits", and also handling the necessary accounting system and "default fund" held by the Custodian.
