Money is a promise of future work or in other words debt itself.

Commodity money isn't necessarily that though. Debt is useful between people that trust each other or intermediaries, but if you trust absolutely no one you can use useful commodities as money. These also happen to be the forms of money that tend to be more resistant to government collapse. They have intrinsic value that stand on its own and encapsulate already performed work rather than just the promise of it.

I don't disagree w/that definition (i think it's incomplete: store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account, etc) however when I use the term debt loosely here I mean the current privately issued, exponential, compounding interest mechanism.

That's the fundamental problem. This was recognized for a long time in the west, we banned usury, but now if you use that word people either have no idea what you are talking about or get mad at you because they make good money off it.