A brief history of money
From pebbles to Bitcoin, to GRAT token and beyond.
Last updated
From pebbles to Bitcoin, to GRAT token and beyond.
Last updated
In the beginning, gift economies and barter were the only way of making transactions.
Back then, humans were limited to the goods that other nearby humans could provide or that travelers could provide.
There was no consensus to use any tokens or small precious objects that would be accepted by a large enough number of humans.
Goods and services were very limited at that specific time in our history because collective knowledge and technology were very primitive.
Even today, in villages and other types of communities, people trade their goods or services, sometimes for free, with no intermediaries.
On the internet, we can see this still taking place on classified-type websites where people trade their goods, assets, and services.
As kingdoms, empires, and societies developed and expanded people were looking to adopt a better system to represent the value of goods and services, something that could be universally accepted as a good fit, a logical choice meeting the following characteristics or qualities:
precious (due to the level of difficulty in obtaining it from the Earth, so it must be a scarce resource or material).
non-perishable (it must last basically forever).
fungible (it can be traded for another unit/object of the same form/material/size/type).
divisible (you can divide it or trade it for smaller parts/units).
versatile (having at least a few uses in different arts, crafts, or technological processes, creating long term-value appreciation as new use cases are always discovered for versatile materials like precious metals and stones, thus creating constant demand).
All these characteristics were met in different degrees by different materials like copper, silver, gold, precious stones, etc.
Eventually, small objects that best met these qualities became a sensible choice for early societies to store value long term, especially because they were easier to carry and keep safe compared to actual large commodities that could become an easy target for thieves.
Miniature replicas of the items exchanged were used in China as currency. People were looking to concentrate the value of valuable large objects into a smaller form.
The first official currency was minted by King Alyattes in the kingdom of Lydia (modern-day Western Turkey). The Lydian Lion was made of an Electrum alloy, a combination of silver and gold.
Paper money appeared in some forms during the Song dynasty in China but became official during the Tang dynasty around 1100 A.D.
Marco Polo's travels into the Asian region inspired the idea of paper money in Europe. But it wasn't until 1661 that the first banknote was issued in Sweden.
In The Coinage Act of 1792 the U.S conceived a currency system and appointed the U.S dollar as the official currency of the U.S - this idea was quickly adopted by the whole world.
The year that killed representative currency and implemented fiat money as "the new game in town", starting with the U.S.
With time, the banking elite's parasitic inflationary fiat system was silently enforced everywhere, replacing deflationary systems around the world.
“The United States had been on a "de facto" gold standard since the 1830s and "de jure" gold standard since 1900. In 1913 the gold standard was built into the framework of the Federal Reserve which is a private company. The law required the Federal Reserve to hold gold equal to 40 percent of the value of the currency it issued (technically termed the Federal Reserve Note but colloquially called the dollar) and to convert those dollars into gold at a fixed price of $20.67 per ounce of pure gold.”
After this, the Federal Reserve was authorized by the government to be the sole printer of U.S dollars and whenever the U.S would need more cash in circulation it would borrow printed dollars from the Federal Reserve and had to pay them back with interest (mind-blowing, I know).
This shows the power these bankers have, such that they managed to “convince” a country like the U.S to give control of the money supply to them.
The Federal Reserve is a private company!
Eventually the gold standard was removed completely and representative currency was a thing of the past everywhere in our world.
Today, the same bankers are everywhere, just under different names. Banks and pharmacies are the most omnipresent entities in our cities and communities.
The main objective of the bankers was to implement the exact same fiat system globally, so they would be the sole keepers of the global money printing process, and not only that, but their mission was also to put the whole world in debt, and they succeeded.
“GIVE me control of a nation's money supply and I care not who makes its laws.” So said Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty.
