As said in the title I wonder how gold was actually considered a currency since ancient times, I get it it’s shiney & humans love shiny stuff but still
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Gold doesn’t corrode. Copper is soft and turns green. Bronze and brass are alloys, not elements, and easier to fake. Silver is the second most common coin metal, it turns black but doesn’t loose weight.
Planet Money Podcast had a great episode about this that I am gonna sum up. Ok, so you want a currency. First we gotta look at elements, you don’t want compounds or alloys cause you can make those, just pure elements. Ok, so you probably don’t want something that is a gas or liquid at room temp for obvious reason. So metals it is. Next you are gonna want something that doesnt oxidize (rust), you don’t want all your treasure to just rot away. Then you want something that you can melt and easily form into different shapes and sizes, things like platinum don’t work cause their melting point it far far too high for bronze era furnaces. That basically leaves just gold/silver, with copper and nickle as your less desirable metals cause they rust.
You can take a gold coin, bury it, dig it back up in two thousand years and it’ll still be as shiny and unchanged as when you buried it.
Used to be, silver would be the same. It didn’t start tarnishing until the Industrial Age when we dumped a ton of sulfur into the air.
Other metals rust, corrode and break down. Gold and silver would not do that.
In addition, rarity = value. In the recorded history of humans, we’ve only produced ~600 tons of gold, making it incredibly rare. I’m just recalling this from a Nat Geo show, so I’m probably wrong on the amounts but still…
Gold isn’t very reactive and can be preserved for a long time, it’s also easily malleable and rarely came in items which were less valuable than the gold itself so it would make sense that you couldn’t easily turn it into coins and return a profit (consider that the process of turning scrap copper into pennies or vice versa costs more than the actual penny to do).
There are a couple things that make something a good currency.
1) your currency must be durable. It must last long periods of time in storage without deteriorating. Most other metals will rust and crumble to nothing over a long period of time. Gold is fairly non reactive and stable
2) your currency must be reasonably difficult to acquire. Gold exists in very few places..at least in concentrations which make it worth refining into a solid metal. Most other metals we knew about at the time we’re either too rare and not able to be held in sufficient quantities or too abundant andaking coinage out of them would be meaningless.
3) the currency must be equally valued by all under your influence. While gold didn’t have any intrinsic uses man at first, it was unique in its beauty. There weren’t any metals that provided such a shiny bright color. Even bronze was a full brown compared to gold. Thuse gold had aesthetic value to most societies.
But believe it or not gold was not the most common currency for the longest time. For much of prehistoric human history, we used cowry shells as currency. These small discarded snail shells were impossible to counterfeit, reasonably durable, and occured just rare enough to make them valuable. Once again we liked their speckled and varied patterns in jewelry. So they became a currency of sorts for early man.
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