Currency has gone from cows to coins to paper to plastic. The next big disruption? We could all be spending digital dough.
THE NEXT TIME you pull a tattered $5 bill out of your pocket to pay for a coffee, consider the fact that you’re handling one of society’s oldest and most important inventions: money. Relatively soon after humans decided that we liked living in groups, instead of in panda-style isolation, we came up with ways to value what we had—and make people pay for it. We bartered cattle and grain until the Lydians—the Bronze Age inhabitants of what is modern-day Turkey—realized those were hard to stuff into a wallet, and introduced government-minted coins. It turned out coins were still a pain to carry around, so eventually they evolved into the paper money we all use today.
But paper was still just a stand-in for metal:Sure, coins mostly disappeared, but we were symbolically carrying gold around in the pockets of our bell-bottom jeans until 1971, when Richard Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard. Divorced from the physical, money became a kind of belief system. It went from representing something precious and valuable to representing value in and of itself. Everyone agrees that if you walk into Starbucks with a $5 bill, you can walk out with a latte.
This story is from the January - February 2016 edition of Popular Science.
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This story is from the January - February 2016 edition of Popular Science.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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