Why are coins round and not square or cubes, etc.?

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Why are coins round and not square or cubes, etc.?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Tradition is very important in money. A big part of the value of money comes from the fact that it’s _perceived_ to have value, and a big part of that perception is “looking like” money.

Regardless of any other useful aspects of round currency, the _real_ reason it’s round is that previous coins were round, and people making new coins wanted them to match the old coins. Those coins were round because they matched older coins, going all the way back to the earliest coins that were created around the ancient Mediterranean (other parts of the world had other traditions).

So why round? The very first Lydian coins were made by placing blobs of electrum onto an anvil containing a pattern and whacking them with a hammer. This naturally produced a flattish, roundish shape with an embossed picture. That shape became traditional and was carried on and refined. All those other reasons to have coins were just later discoveries, the first reason is that’s just the shape you get when you stamp a blob of metal flat so you can stick an image on it.

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