Whenever debt is itself money, this money becomes a self-inflating debt principal by already being its own interest. Hence modern inflation, deflation, and eventual monetary crises. Yet why does money become debt? The concept of representational monetary identity answers to precisely this question.

Money represents a future commodity ownership. However, the only way of keeping this ownership rightful, hence decentralized, is to price commodities in metarepresented money. Any otherwise priced future ownership will not remain rightfully decentralized. This article explains why, by deriving the concepts, first of generic money, then of privately concrete money, and finally of metarepresented money from direct commodity exchange.