By mutual agreement.
Depending on the economic system, it *might* be something akin to a governmental promissory note that allows access to something valuable but inconvenient to carry around in quantities needed for buying stuff (like precious metals), but most countries today use something called fiat currency.
Something that usually blows people’s minds: Money is a social construct. It only exists by our mutual agreement that it exists, and it has value because of our mutual agreement that it has value. And the “we” here is a gestalt societal unit – there may be some individual holdouts who won’t do any business outside of bartering their fruit for goods or services directly, but this doesn’t happen in great enough numbers for it to affect the value of the currency in the vast majority of cases (and when it does, you end up with things like the great depression)
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