Lol, wealthy men don't have to buy the hard money, they can just offer to put it into storage. In the case of gold, they do that for people that don't have a safe to put it in.

In the case of bitcoin, they offer to store it for people that don't do the work and figure out how to store it for themselves.

Once they have it in their custody, they do issue receipts for it and those receipts are treated as real money by those that don't understand. 

Bitcoin is a step in the right direction, because people don't need to own a safe anymore, they just need to use free resources on the internet to learn how to self custody.

Lightning is a step in the right direction, because it is programatically secured against real bitcoin on the base layer on a one for one basis. 

Some people will still use custodial lightning, but now that the ordinals have died, fees are low again and phoenix is less expensive.