History of money

The history of money is a story spanning thousands of years. Related to this, Numismatics is the scientific study of money and its history in all its varied forms.

Money itself must be a scarce good. Many items have been used as money, from naturally scarce precious metals and conch shells through cigarettes to entirely artificial money such as banknotes. Modern money (and most ancient money too) is essentially a token — in other words, an abstraction. Paper currency is perhaps the most common type of physical money today. However, goods such as gold or silver retain many of money's essential properties.

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The emergence of money

The use of proto-money may date back to at least 100,000 B.C. Trading in red ochre is attested in Swaziland, from about that date, and ochre seems to have functioned as a proto-money in Aboriginal Australia. Shell jewellery in the form of strung beads would have served as good with the basic attributes needed of early money. In cultures where metal working was unknown, shell or ivory jewellery were the most divisible, easily storable and transportable, scarce, and hard to counterfeit objects that could be made. It is highly unlikely that there were formal markets in 100,000.Before Present(any more than there are in recently observed hunter-gatherer cultures).

Nevertheless, proto-money would have been useful in reducing the costs of less frequent transactions that were crucial to hunter-gatherer cultures, especially bride purchase, splitting property upon death, tribute, and intertribal trade in hunting ground rights (“starvation insurance”) and implements. In the absence of a medium of exchange, all of these transactions suffer from the basic problem of barter — they require an improbable coincidence of wants or events.

Jewellery has often been used for currency and wealth storage in some historical and contemporary societies, especially those in which modern forms of money are scarce, in addition to being used for decoration and display of status and wealth.

In cultures, of any era, that lack money,bartering and some system of in-kind "credit" or "gift exchange" would be the only ways to exchange goods. Bartering has several problems, most notably the coincidence of wants problem. If one wishes to trade fruit for wheat, it can only be done when the fruit and wheat are both available at the same time and place, which may be for a very brief time, or may be never.

With an intermediate commodity (whether it be shells, rum, gold, etc.) fruit can be sold when it is ripe in exchange for the intermediate commodity. This intermediate commodity can then be used to buy wheat when the wheat harvest comes in. Thus the use of money makes all commodities become more liquid.

Where trade is common, barter systems usually lead quite rapidly to several key goods being imbued with monetary properties. In the early British colony of New South Wales in Australia, rum emerged quite soon after settlement as the most monetary of goods. When a nation is without a fiat currency system it is quite common for the fiat currency of a neighbouring nation to emerge as the dominant monetary good.

In some prisons where conventional money is prohibited, it is quite common for goods such as cigarettes to take on a monetary quality. Gold has emerged naturally from the world of barter again and again to take on a monetary function. It should be noted that the emergence of monetary goods is not dependent on central authority or government. It is a quite natural market phenomenon.