A small caveat is perhaps that fiat currency doesn’t have to be debt based, but in practice seems to always be, thus it’s maybe even a bit unfair to call it “fiat” money because it actually does have something backing it indirectly. I think there might be some evolutionary forces at work here: fiat money that isn’t grounded in something tends to suffer hyperinflation because printing money is just too tempting and so we really only have debt-based fiat currency left after the winnowing process.
A small caveat is perhaps that fiat currency doesn’t have to be debt based, but in practice seems to always be, thus it’s maybe even a bit unfair to call it “fiat” money because it actually does have something backing it indirectly. I think there might be some evolutionary forces at work here: fiat money that isn’t grounded in something tends to suffer hyperinflation because printing money is just too tempting and so we really only have debt-based fiat currency left after the winnowing process.