Fictional things have intrinsic value because they're rare? The value of this imaginary resource cannot be manipulated?
Okay then. I have a magical tiger rock. It looks like rock I picked up out of the garden, with a hole thorugh the middle, but it's really magical - it keeps tigers away. The whole time I've kept that near I've never seen a single tiger so it has to work. Rare doesn't come into it, I've not seen another one anywhere. They don't even make these in China.
I'll swap you this rock of fictional value, for say, that house - something of recognisable worth.
What could possibly go wrong? That sounds like something we can base some long term operations around. There's no flaws in this.
Seriously, history predates money. You can peg down money traversing into common use thanks to the words like "salary" which comes from the latin, salerium - salt - from when they paid wages in salt, a prized comodity in that age. Sure you could potentially argue some tribes used seashells and cultures like the Aztec used the likes of cocca beans but that's not entirely predating history... That's still quite in the middle of history. And not quite "money", either just currency and still tied to a tangible resource of physical - not enforced - scarcity.
Yes, to start an initative akin to my previous spiel one may require finances by virtue of existing in such a restrictive economy - it may even require maintainence, but that could be made to pretty much take care of itself. Pretty critical when you're planning on running it 1.2AU » 2.2AU away, considering. But you can abuse the restrictive economy model surrounding to make that pay for it, if you're cunning. It's the very fact you're relient on such a flawed model which means you're to blame - no more than anyone else doing the same thing admittedly, and that is pretty much everyone. Long story short, things don't change by doing the same thing everyday. And you clearly would need a graph because basic economic theory seems to escape you.
Money, once rendered without purpose, should have no sensible place in existence. I'll concede it may take several generations for the larger population to actually realise this has no purpose, least of all in a post scarcity economy. When there's a stack of everything you can't get rid of fast enough, having a stack of money as well isn't a significant advantage. Human time will still be "valuable" as automation isn't likely to be able to solve every problem, but this can be exchanged for other things, like opportunity.
Take for example how most civillians get themselves flying commercially - After obtaining a license they whore themselves commonly to a small airline to build up the flight hours. It's the flight hours that matter to them, not the paycheque. All other concerns accounted for, I'd wager most will do it just for flying the plane. They actually like doing this, thusly are eager. You should be able to swap what needs to get done with the experience gained from doing it, because people are doing it because they want to, not becuase they have to. Bob can order two widgets from Charles, because Charles makes some nice widgets. Charles shouldn't need to "charge" for this, as anything he needs to do it should already be in abundance, or readily available. And this is just from harvesting - a stage almost assuredly to be reached in order to actually provide the facilities in which Charles and Bob live, or the facilities that will be required to support it long term. Good luck attempting it lift it from the surface of the Earth - it doesn't consider things like the teams of scientists working on a real life "replicator" or othersuch schemes. Just existing technologies and taking what's floating about "aimlessly" and repurposing. The resources of this tiny planet are nothing on the available scale of the solar system. Just the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the Oort cloud is more than we can think about using for quite some time. Charles should gain reward in that it is recognised he makes the best widgets, he should like making widgets or he'd not of started and instead done something he'd like to do. Besides, I'm sure once one has been made it can be scanned and machines can produce more. Which is actually how most things are likely to take place.
As for money being a necessary component of trade, not really. Trade existed before money. Shouldn't be doing things because you'd want to make money, look around you for the mess this causes - mostly by people doing things because they have to, not because they want to - should do things because you'd like to do it. The end product should then be what money cannot buy. Passion. When you do things to make money, you end up limiting yourself drastically. This impacts the output drastically. A wonderful example here is the traditional car. Generally built to make money, the corners cut to make more money, etc etc leaves a product that never quite will be what it could be. The Bugatti Veryon wasn't built to make money, it was built to make a statement: look what we can really do. It cost a lot more to build - let alone design and research - than it retailed for. Look at the difference between that and most other cars. It's what happens when you do something as good as you can do it, as opposed to do it as cheaply as possible. Granted, in the current environment money is a defacto requirement for most things(ignoring things like the "one red paper clip" and other cunning) but think about products from your favorite firms, and start thinking what would be if the people that made that was given everything they wanted, and allowed to build what they really wanted to build... "A free base of scientific knowlege" more than suggests open source, removing the requirement for compensation/reward for contributions, it's just about taking care of everything else for them to do it which is pretty much inevitable in order to realistically account for having somewhere for them to do it.
