6139008-History-of-Money

to counterfeit objects that could be made. It is highly unlikely that there were formal markets in 75,000 B.C. (any morethan there are in recently observed hunter-gatherer cultures). Nevertheless, proto-money would have been useful inreducing 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”) andimplements. 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. Shells of the pea-sized snail Nassarius kraussianus. BlombosCave, South Africa, 75,000 B.C. wear marks indicate the shells were strung on a necklace.In cultures of any era that lack money, barter and some system of in-kind "credit" or "gift exchange" would be the onlyways to exchange goods. Bartering has several problems on small transactions, most notably timing constraints. Ifyou wish to trade fruit for wheat, you can only do this when the fruit and wheat are both available at the same time andplace. That may be a very brief time, or it may be never. With an intermediate commodity (whether it be shells, rum,gold, etc.) you can sell your fruit when it is ripe and take the intermediate commodity. You can then use the intermediatecommodity to buy wheat when the wheat harvest comes in. Thus the use of money makes all commodities become moreliquid. Where trade is common, barter systems usually lead quite rapidly to the emergence of several key goods withmonetary properties. In the early British colony of New South Wales in Australia, rum emerged quite soon aftersettlement as the most monetary of goods. When a nation is without a fiat currency system, it is quite common for thefiat currency of a neighboring nation to emerge as the dominant monetary good. In some prisons where conventionalmoney is prohibited it is quite common for goods such as cigarettes to take on a monetary quality. Gold has emergednaturally from the world of barter again and again to take on a monetary function. It should be noted that theemergence of monetary goods is not dependent on central authority or government. It is a quite naturalmarket phenomenon.The first instances of money were objects which were useful for their intrinsic value. This was known as commodity moneyand included any commonly-available commodity that has intrinsic value; historical examples include pigs, rare seashells,whale's teeth, and (often) cattle. In medieval Iraq, bread was used as an early form of currency. Spices have been usedas commodity money for long. Definite indications are available that both black and white pepper have been used ascommodity money for hundreds of years before Yeshuah-Jesus-Issa, as also several centuries thereafter. Being a valuablecommodity, pepper has naturally been used as payment. Attila the Hun reportedly demanded 3,000 pounds in weight ofpepper in 408 AD as part of a ransom for the city of Rome. In the Middle Ages, there was a French saying, 'As dear aspepper'. In England, rent could be paid in pounds of pepper, and so a symbolic minimal amount is known as a"peppercorn rent". Even in the industrialized world, in the absence of other types of money, people have occasionally usedcommodities such as tobacco as money. This last happened on a wide scale after World War II when cigarettes becameused unofficially in Europe, in parallel with other currencies, for a short time. Precious metals have been a common formof money, such as this gold from Sveriges Riksbank.Another example of "commodity money" is shell money in the Solomon Islands. Shells are painstakingly chipped intorough circles, filed down, and threaded onto large necklaces, which are then used during marriage proposals; for instance,a father may charge twenty shell money necklaces for his daughter's hand in marriage. One interesting example ofcommodity money is the huge limestone coins from the Micronesian island of Yap, quarried at great peril from a sourceseveral hundred miles away. The value of the coin was determined by its size — the largest of which could range fromnine to twelve feet in diameter and weigh several tons. Displaying a large coin, often outside one's home, was aconsiderable status symbol and source of prestige in that society. (Due to the great inconvenience, islanders would oftentrade only promises of ownership of an individual coin instead of actually moving it. In some cases, coins which had beenlost at sea were still used for exchange in this way. These agreements could be thought of as a kind of representativemoney, described below.) An example is the 8-foot "coin" from the village of Gachpar, on Yap.Once a commodity becomes used as money, it takes on a value that is often a bit different from what thecommodity is intrinsically worth or useful for. Being able to use something as money in a society adds an extra useto it, and so adds value to it. This extra use is a convention of society, and how extensive the use of money is within thesociety will affect the value of the monetary commodity. So although commodity money is real, it should not be seen ashaving a fixed value in absolute terms. Its value is still socially determined to a large extent. A prime example is gold,which has been valued differently by many different societies, but perhaps none valued it more than those who used it asmoney. Fluctuations in the value of commodity money can be strongly influenced by supply and demandwhether current or predicted (if a local gold mine is about to run out of ore, the relative market value of goldmay go up in anticipation of a shortage).Money can be anything that the parties agree is tradable, but the usability of a particular sort of money varies widely.Desirable features of a good basis for money include being able to be stored for long periods of time, dense so it can becarried around easily, and difficult to find on its own so that it is actually worth something. Again, supply and demand playa key role in determining value. Metals like gold and silver have been used as commodity money for thousands of years,being in the form of metal dust, nuggets, rings, bracelets and assorted pieces. Eventually the Lydians began coininggold and silver around 560 BC. Gold and silver are both quite soft metals, and coins minted from the puremetals suffer from wear or deformation in daily use. Fortunately these metals are also easily alloyed with a lessexpensive metal, frequently copper, in order to improve the durability of the resulting coins. Typically alloys of coinagemetals, such as sterling silver or 22 carat (92%) gold, are used to make coins more durable. These are alloys of 90% ormore precious metal as alloys of less than 90% do not improve hardness or durability very much, and so are typicallyconsidered to be on the slippery slope into monetary debasement.The Hidden History Of Money & New World Order Usury Secrets Revealed at last! Page 24