Talk to chatgpt about how a checking account works, and really understand what happens when you put some money in the bank, and when you transfer that money to another person at another bank, how it's accounted for, how the banks actually do that transfer.

That's 80% of the thing right there.

> If so, what specific steps do you suggest I take to acquire a similar understanding?

School! Teachers! Classes!

Seriously, the traditional higher ed system is still a very good place to learn things like this. (I honestly tend to forget about it since academia hasn't really caught up at teaching software engineering, but that's really the exception rather than the rule ...). For traditional subjects like finance/economics, you can absolutely find inexpensive extension courses taught by people who care about pedagogy.

Reply to the edit: the parent comment was making a joke (though maybe there is some depth to it) and your reply sounds like a rhetorical question by a spoilsport. Unfortunate!

ETA: it's a joke because the original saying is "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"

MIT opencourseware has an intro to finance course that was taught as the financial crisis was unfolding. I highly recommend it.

Going to school and reading up on how and why we got where we are...?

Some people (particularly criminals and oligarchs) might not like them, but most of the structures around financial movements exist for very practical reasons, often stemming from the will to uphold the rule of law. Obviously nothing is perfect (the US have an excessive level of control, VISA/Mastercard are de-facto monopolies, etc etc), but one cannot seriously think that the way to fix things is to reimplement everything from scratch in a wild west of shady unaccountable operators...

Watch Yanis Varoufakis videos on youtube.

If you want to quick primer to read tonight I suggest “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp by Radford”. Will be free download.