The End of Money by New Scientist

Author:New Scientist
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2017-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

This Roman coin is from around 400 CE, but the first coins were made 300 years earlier.

As trade networks expand, keeping track of IOUs becomes unwieldy. At that point it makes sense to introduce a physical currency. One of the first organized systems of coinage was created in 8th-century Europe by the emperor Charlemagne, and was based upon silver.

But in fact, there still wasn’t much of the actual coinage in existence. What mattered were the units – livres, sous and deniers, the model for many later currencies including pounds, shillings and pence – which were standardized and used to keep track of the exchange of goods, swapped back and forth in ledgers, but rarely changing hands in actual pieces of currency.

The practice of money in ledger form has survived to the current day, sometimes utilizing high technology, and sometimes low technology. The Bank of England still kept track of debits and credits using split sticks of willow wood known as ‘tallies’ until the mid-19th century. Today, ledgers are sometimes kept in the form of chains of cryptographic hashes.

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