Why was gold and silver used as currency thousands of years ago as opposed to something else with more utility?
Why was gold and silver used as currency thousands of years ago as opposed to something else with more utility?
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Is pretty. Can be easily worked into things that look even more pretty. Don't really rust or decay so can last a long time and be buried for long time and recovered later.
These.
Weird to me how Mesoamericans never used it for trading among the commoners. They thought it was literal feces shat out by the gods.
Also blood or food of gods.
Because it's rare but not super rare. And it can't be faked.
Gold
>Doesn't spoil
>Doesn't go stale
>Doesn't rust
>Doesn't corrode
If you're choosing a material to use as a medium of exchange in a pre-civilization vacuum, gold is really a no-brainer.
>as opposed to something else with more utility?
Because the things with more utility are things that are better used for said utility. Using iron for coins is a waste of perfectly good iron that could be made into armor and weapons instead.
Copper 'utility objects' were used as currency, axes and such, theres parts of the world such as the danube basin where fuckloads of unused copper axes are found stashed away in mint condition and same unused axes are found along traderoutes of the period
Another thing used as mentioned in homeric epics were so called 'stools' made of metal, these were treated like stores of wealth that could be given in exchange, same with pots and armor
Oil and salt were also common currencies, as well as furs
It was the next best thing before crypto existed.
its rare and requires work to acquire, someone cant go collect a bunch and crash your economy
it doesnt degrade over time, especially gold
can be divided into various sizes
not easily faked
one quantity is basically identical to another (fungible) in a way that pretty stones or seashells are not
>someone cant go collect a bunch and crash your economy
Funny that, thats exactly what happened in many such cases
They are shiny and rare and feel nice.
Gold was the densest substance they were aware of.
Silver is also dense. Though not as dense as lead, silver plated lead will bend easily, hence the practice of biting a coin (and receiving lead poisoning in the process). Coins were made thin so that it was difficult to manufacture fake coins with a lead core, coated in iron and plated in silver, more expensive in terms of labor than the materials themselves since they would be hand crafted.
Coins could further be designed to make shaving and other practices more difficult.
>g
>implying gravity is real and by extension the earth is totally round
NPC post discarded
We stopped utilizing it as currency because of its electronic utility.
Because currency is for buying things with utility.
More specifically, currency is a unit that has a similar value to everybody regardless of what is actually useful to them. It's actually much better for that unit to be not very useful to most people, because if people all wanted it for their own use, then it wouldn't circulate and would be an effective medium of exchange. And that's even assuming you could identify a medium that had an equal utility, or value, to everybody. Are you going to trade goat hides to a herdsman? Are you going to sell water to a guy who lives on the river? The magic of currency is that people can exchange goods and services without some coincidence of their needs and means lining up.
tell me how kings and kingdoms would be able to accumulate wealth without gold or silver.
grains are good but they rot and spoil in transportation
>Why was gold and silver used as currency thousands of years ago as opposed to something else with more utility?
The utility is that they are long term good units of account, Roman coins from 2000 years ago still have raw metal value, outside of fine art what else held that value? Nothing.
If you care about the topic I highly suggest watching this reading of Nick Szabo's paper Shelling Out. It was cited on the original Bitcoin website.
Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (FULL VIDEO)
>something else with more utility
was more often used as currency than silver and ever more than gold.