History of money: why did we settle on metal for money instead of something else ?

Question

For example most regions had a rural/ agrarian economy and could have used cattle horns. It would have represented their amount of cattle they had and therefore their actual wealth.
I think there is a small group of people in africa doing something like that with fish right now.

So why settle for metal coins?

In: Economics

Answer 1

One of the chief features of a physical currency is that it is easy for the mint to make, but hard for anyone else. And *if* anyone else does try to make it, being able to find and stop them is a great bonus.

Metal can be cast, which is great for mass manufacturing. And a cast can produce a super detailed (hard to copy) coin for the same effort as a simple coin. There is no equivalent mass scalable, “detail for free” method to shaping horn, except maybe branding/burning a design into it.

But then theres the other side of the issue: hard for the other guy to make. It is easy to make horn (grows on ~~trees~~ cattle), and a brand is also easy to copy. Metal, on the other hand, comes from a limited supply, requires special tools, and requires foundries. So again: easy to mint, but hard for others to make. Especially when you use special metals that aren’t used for much else; the mint can control the supply, so it’s even harder for anyone else to get it, to make forgeries. And if someone does get your special metal, or isn’t able to hide a big foundry, you can easily shut them down by taking the metal or breaking the foundry. Again, nothing like this exists for horns. Or pretty much any other ancient material.

And even with all this horns don’t “directly represent wealth.” They dont really represent number of cattle, because of balancing between steers and heifers. And cattle weren’t really used for wealth by everyone (and not at the same ‘scale’ among those that did). The other issue, more broadly, is that, in a large scale economy, money is most useful when its most abstract. If it’s too direct (like being literal fish or wheat or horns), then people will just focus on making “money” instead of actually being productive.