Currency

[Isard]

I'm sick to death of hearing people bitch about "paper" and humanities obsession with it. This stops now. This, is why the "paper" has value.

According to wikipedia,

This first stage of currency, where metals were used to represent stored value, and symbols to represent commodities, formed the basis of trade in the Fertile Crescent for over 1500 years.

...the recovery of Phoenician trade in the ninth and tenth centuries BC that saw a return to prosperity, and the appearance of real coinage, possibly first in Anatolia with Croesus of Lydia and subsequently with the Greeks and Persians. In Africa many forms of value store have been used including beads, ingots, ivory, various forms of weapons, livestock, the manilla currency, ochre and other earth oxides, and so on.

And finally, the Chinese (one of the most innovative nations in the early world) created the first "paper".

In premodern China, the need for credit and for circulating a medium that was less of a burden than exchanging thousands of copper coins led to the introduction of paper money, commonly known today as banknotes.

Currency - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Trade evolved from "I'll trade you my cow for some tool's" to, I'll trade my cow to another for a representation of my cows value, trade this new placeholder for new tools, and other things. The paper itself is not valuable, its what it represents that is. Now in the US, we used to use the "gold standard" meaning that all currency was actually gold, every dollar in circulation had 1$ in gold stored in one of several safe-houses around the country, however, with the increase in national trade, most countries have abandoned the gold standard. Instead, the dollar now represents services rendered or goods traded.


Can we get this stickied so I never, ever, again have to explain to the uninformed why "paper" is important?