I'm interested in the discussion about what makes money money. Two questions:
Obscurity - A Bookkeeping Concept
In the case of cryptocurrency, there is no intermediate counterparty holding records on your behalf. (If there was, a system like cryptonote might still be of some use). Cryptocurrency therefore re-orders the priorities of monetary transparency and record keeping privacy such that latter becomes the domain of the holder and not the monetary media itself. This is what allows bitcoin to be defined as base money as opposed to a mere record keeping system.
I'm not sure I understood the point here and I think that is making it more difficult to get the rest of your discussion. Can you elaborate a bit?
You can't just take a cryptographic banking system, throw away the bank and call it money. (You can fool some of the people...).
What specific problems result from obscuring the blockchain? Why does hiding transactions make something less like money? (and for the Monero people here, is this actually what Monero does? If not, please explain why so that someone with limited familiarity with Monero or cryptography could understand.)