What is Money Anyway?

This week in my Institutional Economics class we pondered the question... What is Money Anyway? It turns out, this question occurs to most everyone who studies the economy long enough. This American Life and Planet Money correspondents published "The Invention of Money" where they came up with the answer that money is fiction.  L. Randall Wray argues in "An Irreverent Overview of the History of Money From the Beginning of the Beginning Through the Present" that the key to understanding money is recognizing its origins in the concept of debt. I have come to the conclusion that money is not fiction, but it is not exactly fact either. Money is what we make of it, and we have really made a mess!