https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU6NaDs-7ww
Money (cash) is simply a medium of exchange; a more convenient way of exchanging goods or services than bartering. It has no intrinsic value and typically changes in value over time, sometimes quite drastically.
So, instead of trading a pair of socks for apples (and negotiating an acceptable number of apples for the socks; especially if the apple seller does not need socks), we pay $4 for 2 kg of apples and sell our socks somewhere else for $5.
People were trading amber, obsidian, sea shells and ochre in Africa more than 100,000 years ago; long before our ancestors started systematic agriculture. They bartered food, articles for decoration and material for tools until the idea of money developed as traders in Africa, China and India began using cowry shells as a medium of exchange. (The connection between wealth and jewellery began early).
As village markets grew, sellers and buyer devised ways to measure quantities and relative values and began recording transactions so there was no later arguing that the buyer or seller had been short-"changed". As barter became more difficult, tokens were used more and more often. Early quantities, values and debts were recorded by notches on sticks, knots in string, or marks on baked clay storage pots and clay tablets.
The first recorded use of a unit of weight and currency was the shekel in Babylon, Mesopotamia, (Iraq) in 3000 BCE. It was a weight of barley and a specified weight of silver, bronze or copper. The Code of Hammurabi about 1760 BCE specified legal rules concerning debt, private property, contracts and codes of business practices.
Metal was used as money because it was durable, portable, easily divisible and scarce. Initially, pieces of gold, silver, copper and tin were used. The Egyptians were using gold bars of a fixed weight as a money about 3000 BCE, while the Chinese were using bronze coins in the shape of cowrie shells, miniature bronze knives and spades (to indicate their value) from about 1000 BCE.
The Greeks stamped coins with markings from about 700 BCE; about the same time the Chinese were casting coins with square holes in the centre so that they could be strung like beads. Disk-shaped, gold, silver or bronze coins with an image on both sides (often the head of a king) became common. The Greek silver mines and silver coinage were two of the reasons the Athenian Empire dominated the Mediterranean sea in the 5th century BCE. A temple built for the goddess Moneta, in the 4th century BCE, became a Roman mint and the source of the English words money and mint.
Money allowed wealth to be stored in a non perishable form and it was easily hidden and transported. It also permitted more graduated pricing for trades and trading for foods like apples and fish when seasons did not coincide. Early civilizations made standard coins to facilitate trade and payment of taxes and it didn't take long before the production of coins was controlled by rulers who realized that they could make money by debasing the coins; reducing the weight of gold and substituting cheaper silver or other metals while maintaining the same face value.
Money evolved from a coin being a unit of weight (think pounds Sterling) to being a unit of value. This caused problems as gold and silver could be scraped from the periphery of the coins and also because of changes in the relative value of silver, gold and copper. In England in the 1670's CE, the value of a gold guinea coin began to rise compared to the silver crown coin, causing an increase in silver exports in exchange for gold imports. In the 1730's the Bank of England guaranteed to change silver money into gold at a fixed rate which, in a moment of crisis, almost caused a run on the bank as customers demanded their silver money be changed into gold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNOg24-DtQA
The idea of banknotes was introduced in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907) when merchants and wholesalers wanted avoid the heavy bulk of copper coinage for large commercial transactions. However, the earliest banknotes were printed during Song dynasty China during the 11th century and, by the early 12th century, the banknotes issued in each year were equivalent to 26 million strings of copper coins. And the sentence for the crime of forgery was death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBZZeaoC2Fk
YOU ARE READING
Wealth
Non-FictionBanking began in Florence, Venice and Genoa in the 14th century when Jews set up their benches in the piazzas to loan money and insure farmers crops. The ideas spread to Amsterdam and London, while the first stock exchange began in Amsterdam in 161...
