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Yeah, reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noQsHiTJAXo

Money is the substrate of virtually all of society beyond a handful of your peers. If you utterly destroyed it, society would collapse.

Just shoot the guy holding the bag of cash, (or just threaten to) and now you have cash to pay the troops.

I mean you eventually run out of people to shoot to take bags from if you can't reasonably create more of the currency through economic activity and war is prohibitively expensive. It's also not likely the persons holding the bags that can already pay for their own troops wouldn't do so.

In fact, Roman gold currency was invented primarily to pay the troops. As a result gold as a currency only circulated around regions where the military was fighting, and in peaceful areas far from warfare the usual methods of debts and IOUs were used to pay for things.

If you’re still curious, read Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5000 years” which delves into the Roman monetary system in detail.