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

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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

13 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Horns grow back. You don’t want people to easily be able to reproduce your units of currency or you will get bunches of forgeries. Also distributing currency based on existing wealth makes no sense and misunderstands the entire concept of currency.

Metal is also easy to mold and shape while being somewhat difficult to replicate. If you want 1000 units of currency you really don’t want to be trying to carve horns or something. Instead stamping or molding metal coins makes way more sense.

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