[finasteridonline]

Sidebar on gold and gold-backed currency and stuff like that:

Because I said I would get to it...

The above pretend history of the pretend village is not how modern money actually came to be. In reality, things are much less sequential and happen much more contemporaneously without the "eureka!" moments. The above was a parable to illustrate how money works to a 5-year-old, not an actual history of how money emerged.

Until fairly recent times, paper money was not really very useful or practical for most purposes, especially if you wanted to spend money in a different village than where it was printed.

If we go back in time a period before ATMs, wire-transfers, widespread literacy, etc, then a piece of paper written in Timbuktu is not likely to get you very far in Kathmandu. You could take your apples and deer-haunches and shoes around with you to trade, but the earliest naturally-emerging currencies tend to be hard things that were rare and easily-identifiable (jewels, colored shells, etc), and they frequently coincided with the personal decorations of the rich, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop (people with a surplus of time and food could decorate themselves with pretty things, which became valuable as status symbols, which made them more valuable as decorations, which made them more valuable as barter objects, which made them more prestigious shows of wealth, etc).

Gold emerged as a sort of inevitable global currency, before people even thought of it as currency. It is rare, portable, easy to identify, can easily be made into jewelry, and can be easily quantified (unlike, say, jewels or seashells, which are harder to treat as a "substance"). Once word got around that rich people like it, it became easy to barter with anyone, anywhere, for anything.

In the early stages, it was not really the same thing as "money", it was just an easy thing to barter. But it had money-like characteristics:


If someone walked into your apple-orchard offering to trade a yellow rock for apples, you might look at them a little funny. What use does an apple-grower have for a yellow rock?


But if you know that rich people in town covet this soft yellow metal as something they can make jewelry out of, then you might be happy to trade apples for it.


Once everyone knows that rich people will trade for this stuff, it becomes something like actual currency: neither the hunter, the shoemaker, nor the fisherman in town has much use for it, but because they know they can redeem it for the stuff they do want and need, it becomes a sort of transferable IOU that can be redeemed anywhere, i.e., money.

The early history of paper money did not evolve the way I described in the earlier posts (although it could have, and would have got to the same place). Instead, the early history of paper money was certificates issued by storage-vaults of precious metals (i.e., early "banks"). Instead of carrying around yellow and silver rocks, you could deposit them somewhere and get a piece of paper entitling the holder to withdraw a certain quantity of gold or silver or whatever.

Pre-1934 dollars, like virtually all paper currency until fairly recently, could be redeemed for physical gold or silver at a Federal Reserve Bank, and dollars were only printed if the treasury had enough physical gold and silver to "pay off" the bearer with precious metals.

For a whole lot of reasons that are topics for another discussion, decisions were made that eventually led to the abandonment of the "gold standard" and now the dollar, like most modern currencies, is pure fiat paper: it's only "worth" whatever everyone agrees it is worth, and can only be "redeemed" by trading it to someone else for whatever they will give you for it. There are long, loud, and ongoing feuds over whether that was a good idea, and I'm not going to get into that here.
[haha I wish you would get into it.]