When the notion of "money" appeared and what they needed

In the time of primitive people, the concept of "money", as we know it, did not exist. Even the very definition of "personal property" was very vague. Several skins, a burned stick, a stone ax. The main values of the prehistoric man - food, fire and shelter - were communal.

Where did it all come from

With the evolution of man, his ability to influence the world around him also changed. He created more and more material values: clothing and footwear, hunting and fishing gear, dishes and much more. With the emergence of a clear boundary, "mine is not mine," it appears that exchange trade also appeared. You to me - I to you. The value of things was conditional and relative and depended on many accompanying factors. Fresh meat was valued more expensive than hardened, but jerky even more, because the shelf life was much longer than fresh. The more objects appeared, the more often there was a need for a certain point of reference, the measure of the value of this or that thing.

Natural money

Of course, our distant ancestors did not immediately reach banknotes with five degrees of protection. The first "money" was some items that could be used directly in everyday life. For example, the most common "currency" in many regions was salt - the product is certainly useful. Here you can include cocoa, coffee, tea tiles ... Rice used money in the Middle Kingdom, and in Iceland - dried fish. But in some countries the notion of "money" extended to beautiful shells or just stones with a hole in the middle.

Metal was a transitional link between natural money and money systems. Copper and iron are the first metals that humanity has mastered, were widely used in everyday life, and were a value in themselves. From a bar of iron, which was received for a pile of animal skins, it was possible to forge an ax, a plow or a sword.

But as the production of these metals increased, their value began to decrease, and something that was more expensive with less weight and size was required. The universal measure was two metals - silver and gold. Despite the fact that iron and bronze were more practical, people were fascinated by the beauty and durability of precious metals. The second reason for their widespread use was at the same time their ubiquity and "rare earth". It is well known that the more difficult a thing is, the more valuable it is. With the acquisition of their "legitimate places" in gold and silver, the concept and functions of money were finally formed.

Monetary systems

As the exchange of goods and the emergence of state structures that regulated it increased, a need arose for a uniform system, the basis of which was, in fact, the monetary units themselves-coins. Most often they were metal disks made of gold, silver and copper, although sometimes money was also found from precious, semiprecious and ordinary stones.

The earliest coins were, in fact, just a plate of metal with a "seal", which certified that it had a certain amount of gold, silver or copper (iron and other metals were used, but much less often). Later, the coins began to improve, they acquired the face value and turned into a monetary system. Actually, the concept of "money" in many of us is associated more with the organization of the financial and monetary system than with specific banknotes.

With the complication of commodity-money settlements, coins became more and more differentiated - in one system there could be more than a dozen different denominations. Weight, size, metal content in each of them was regulated. As we see, the concept and types of money are constantly becoming more complicated and improved.

Money is cash and not very

We mean that cashless settlement is the brainchild of our computer age, when most of the financial transactions occur without the physical movement of money. In fact, the first banks, and, accordingly, bank receipts, appeared in Ancient Babylon, therefore, the notion of cash and cashless payment is almost as old as money itself.

Paper money

The next important milestone in the history of money and the development of monetary systems was the emergence of banknotes. They appeared in China, in the tenth century, but they did not receive much distribution in the world, since the paper was too expensive and difficult to manufacture at that time. Their triumphal procession around the world paper bills began in the XV century, with the invention of Gutenberg printing press. Since then, paper money has quickly replaced the metal coins - they were cheaper, more practical and easier.

Initially, the value of each paper bill was clearly fixed in precious metal - for each banknote it was possible to get a certain amount of gold or silver. In the future, with the growth of inflation and, most importantly, the emergence of the banking system with its concept of credit, the "cost" of paper bills all diminished until it was finally unbound from precious metals. The concept of "money" from something tangible and tangible has become almost an abstraction, something like a mathematical function.

Today, the main measure of value is the so-called reserve currency - generally recognized, most used in international settlements. The first such currency was the British pound, and after 1944 - the US dollar.