Virtual money has been around for centuries - Barter, long thought to be our first means of financial interaction, only appeared recently
that: “No example of a barter economy from which money emerged has ever existed.”
There is good reason to believe that barter is not an ancient phenomenon at all, but has only really become widespread in modern times. Certainly in most of the cases we know about, it takes place between people who are familiar with the use of money but, for one reason or another, don’t have a lot of it around.
The most compelling evidence for this suggestion came with the translation, first of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and then of Mesopotamian cuneiform. These texts not only pushed back scholars’ knowledge of written history to roughly 3500 BC, they also revealed that credit systems actually preceded the invention of coinage by thousands of years.
The vast majority of cuneiform documents are financial in nature, providing us a clear view of the Mesopotamian economy. The basic monetary unit in Sumeria, which was a part of ancient Mesopotamia, was the silver shekel. One shekel’s weight in silver was established as the equivalent of a bushel of barley. The silver shekel did not, however, circulate very much. Most of it just sat around in carefully guarded temple and palace treasuries.
At this point, just about every aspect of the conventional story of the origins of money lies in ruins. Rarely has an historical theory been so absolutely and systematically refuted. The standard account of monetary history is actually back to front. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money, or credit, came first.
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