I remember learning about bartering in some elementary school, but it didn’t occur to me to ask until now. How the heck does a society collectively agree that “mm yes these metal circles equate to cows”? Does the government just give everyone 100 shmeckles and let supply and demand cover the rest?
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It doesn’t really matter if barter or something else came before. What you need to know is this: as soon as the number of transactions taking place becomes non-trivial, you need some medium in between to express the value of goods and services exchanged.
It’s just a level of abstraction. That level of abstraction isn’t needed in pre-civilization. As soon as you have civilization you need it.
As most people have trouble dealing in straight abstractions, the first money was coins, and the worth of those coins was whatever they were made of. Thus, copper for the smallest transactions, silver for the intermediate, and gold for the big, wholesale-level ones. Since the fall of the gold standard it’s entirely abstract though, which is good. It’s too much trouble to have to get someone to decide whether that shiny thing you’re offering up really is gold/silver/copper or just colored that way. (Old cash registers had a marble slab in front where you could hit a coin to see if it rang. Slugs didn’t ring.) Modern money represents a value, and the various governments have come up with ways of insuring it’s “real” that are far more convenient. Mostly these days people just do everything digitally, via credit/debit cards and accounts, so even the need for cash is slowly fading.
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