Ok I'll bite. Excel skills. If I provide excel skills in exchange for a note that says 1$ , that 1$ note represents excel skills someone received in exchange for it. I can then exchange that 1$ note for a single bottle of cool refreshing whiskey. The whiskey vender then exchanges that 1$ note for two bottles from a whiskey supplier.
What's the fixed rate at which Excel skills are convertible to dollars? Surely it changes with every transaction.
In your own example, a dollar is worth a bottle of whiskey. And simultaneously worth two bottles of whiskey.
That doesn't seem like a dollar represents a value - it apparently represents a wide range of different values depending in who is doing what trades for it. A dollar is only of value because it's worth a dollar.
A dollar bill has the exact same intrinsic value, due to being a piece of paper, as a thousand dollar bill, or a similarly sized piece of toilet paper. But the extrinsic value is determined at each transaction, and the dollar need not be worth the same amount of stuff (whether it's excel skills, or whiskey, or any else), twice.
A dollar's value is entirely dependent on how much people want dollars. And as you can't eat dollars or live in them or drive them or get them to make you a spreadsheet, that amount would be zero, except that people can always find someone else who values dollars.
Ultimately, dollars are the only way to pay taxes, so everyone knows that in the worst case scenario, they can always get Uncle Sam to force other people to need dollars to avoid jail, and thereby get those people to swap the dollars you have, for the stuff you want.
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