I was watching Hudson's and Desai's video on money and the dollar system, where Hudson mentions that money is debt, but I didn't understand the concepts. Then I found this video explaining it more succinctly, with cartoons and historical development and such, but I still don't understand it at all.
I'm looking for extremely basic introductions on the matter - how exactly did debt connect with exchange of commodities? How did that develop into what we have now? What does a bank really do behind the curtains?
In addition to what @came_apart_at_Kmart said, you should think of it as this. The 'denomination' of debt is unaffected by inflation. When you take out a 100 dollar loan, it doesn't become a debt of 200 dollars just because the value of the dollar has halved. This means that debt, unlike currency, is the constant financial asset around which 'value' is assigned, and 'money' is just a fungible form of debt that changes value based off of how much debt is allowed out by the banks at any given time.
That being said, because debt is controlled by the banks, there is theoretically an unlimited amount of debt that can be accessed until creditors come to collect.