I wonder to what extent governmental retention of minting coins is just PR to reinforce the archaic belief that money is still call by value, when it's actually call be reference.
Isn't it sort of like virtual memory? Each process (consumer) has the illusion that all of its memory pages (dollars) are in RAM (backed by specie), but since it isn't actually using all of those pages at once, the OS (Federal Reserve) can swap some of them out to disk (print more money).
Only, when all processes try to use their RAM all at once the system used to crash.
I doubt that most people know the difference between specie and fiat money in the first place.
And to inhibit the notion that all of those references just point to null.