'...the peculiar feature of a money economy is that some commodities are denied a role as potential or actual means of payment. To state the same idea as an aphorism: Money buys goods and goods buy money but in a monetary economy goods do not buy goods. This restriction is - or ought to be - the central theme of the theory of a money economy.' -Robert Clower [ A Reconsideration of the Microfoundations of Monetary Theory , 1967] I started to sell some of my XRP yesterday, and the process of doing so brought to mind Robert Clower's famous quote. Clower's aphorism describes an idealized pure-money economy that exists only in theory. Were we to apply it to the real world, we'd be missing a lot. To begin with, Clower omits "money" for "money" transactions like the XRP trade I'm about to describe. XRP is the cryptocurrency used to pay transaction fees in the Ripple system . In order to arrive at my end goal of holding Canadian paper, I have to ent...