Where Did Money Come From?

Where did money come from?

Money. Everybody needs it. We can’t live without it. But where did it come from? How did people first start using money?

A long time ago there was no such thing asmoney. People used to barter, or exchange things, when they wanted things. For example, a farmer might exchange some corn or animals for clothes but it wasn’t a very good system. Corn doesn’t last long,and animals die and they are also difficult to carry and it was impossible to have a fixed price, so people invented money.

Most banknotes only last for 18 months before they are replaced.

Atfirst people didn’t use money such a coins or banknotes. In China in about 1200 B.C., they started using things like Cowrie shells or metal tools as currency. In other parts of the world they usedother objects. The first coins appeared during the seventh century B.C. in western Turkey at the same time that the first stores appeared. Within the next 30 years, the use of gold and silver coins spreadall across Eastern Europe and many parts of Asia By 630 B.C., governments made coins from cheaper metals, not gold or silver.

The American $ symbol comes from the old Spanish Dollar or peso.About a thousand years later in China, people started to put their money in banks to keep it safe. The banks gave them a receipt as a promise written on paper to pay back the money. People started touse these instead of money. The first printed banknotes, which were supposed to have the same value as coins, appeared in Sweden in 1661. But this system didn’t work well initially because the banksdidn’t have enough coins to cover banknotes. But by the 1690s, the idea of paper money started to take hold and has stayed with us ever since.

However, for money to have value, everybody needs toagree it has value. Roman Emperor Nero added other metals to his gold and silver coins so he could keep more of himself, but people realized they were worth less than the real coins and thus did not...