The History of Money

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1. alchemist1e9Mar 2024
   So strange that currency isn’t considered something useful. I’d recommend “The History of Money” by Weatherford. Innovation in monetary and financial systems are directly connected to human progress and an integral part of it. I’d propose in 20-30 years legacy fiat currency advocates will carry a sense of embarrassment trying to explain why they defended such an abusive system based on confiscation and war with a record of death and destruction and collapse, over a system with transparency and fairness that promoted the greatest expansion of clean global energy imaginable and helped end the endless tribal warfare between nations. But yeah … nothing useful.
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2. justupvotingJun 2021
   Jack Weatherford's book on the history of money was pretty good. Lots of tracing the transitional periods as valuables give way to abstractions give way to further abstractions on the abstraction-- and documenting where they chafe (reliably, they do).

   https://www.amazon.com/History-Money-Jack-Weatherford/dp/060...

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3. mckossNov 2011
   A good book covering the subject is The History of Money (Jack Weatherford). Money was has had a tradition of being valuable in its own right (gold and silver coin), and eventually banks created paper money that represented an amount of gold held in reserve.

   The Bank of England, was at first a private entity (established in 1688) and was only nationalized in 1946[1]. The notes they issued were backed by deposits of coin, gold, or silver. They broke with the gold standard in 1931, and it's then we see money tied not to a specific asset, but rather as a debt instrument; it's valuable only because someone promises to pay you back.

   When the debtor is a nation-state, we have fiat money, and the money is backed only by the faith and credit of the nation who issues it.

   As Weatherford's book points out, fiat currency was not invented by the British, as the Chinese were using a similar system in the 1st or 2nd century, and continued to use a paper money system until 1399. Abuses destroyed the value of the paper currency, and it did not reappear in China until the 20th century.

   [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_England

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