"but as long as we all believe it has value, it does".

Would one argue that an airplane is a _story_ ? If no one believed in the technology and lost faith in all pilots no one would fly. But that doesn't change the reality of the technology and competence of the pilots.

I get the sentiment, but I am not sure _story_ is the right word.

Well no, an airplane is a tangible thing that can fly, and as long as the safety culture of the people responsible for flying airplanes is strong enough, so crashes are very rare, people will fly with it.

Currency OTOH is basically a (forgery-proof) piece of paper with a number written on it, or even just a number in a database on some (hopefully well-protected) server. So it can only be used to buy stuff as long as we all agree that it's worth something. Of course, it helps if a government and/or a central bank is behind it, but even without a functioning government, a currency can limp on for decades, such as in Somalia, where the last banknotes were printed in 1991, but people still used them as the lowest "rung" of a three-tier system consisting of the Somali shilling, the US dollar and mobile phone payments, until recently when businesses sort of agreed to not accept them anymore (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/11/poorest-somali...).