[jmcmichael]

This article makes the same mistakes that the OP's article does - assumes the truth of the myth of barter. It even uses the odd term 'time-offset barter', which I have never seen outside of libertarian/ancap analyses. Barter is a spot transfer, 'time offset barter' isn't barter but something else.

[samatman]

I'm quite sure you didn't read the article, which does no such thing.

[jmcmichael]

From the article:

Barter requires a coincidence of interests. Alice grows some pecans and wants some apples; Bob grows apples and want some pecans. They just happen to have their orchards near each other, and Alice just happens to trust Bob enough to wait between pecan harvest time and apple harvest time. Assuming all these conditions are met, barter works pretty well. But if Alice was growing oranges, even if Bob wanted oranges as well as pecans, they'd be out of luck -- oranges and apples don 't both grow well in the same climate. If Alice and Bob didn't trust each other, and couldn't find a third party to be a middleman [L94] or enforce a contract, they'd also be out of luck.

This is the canonical Myth of Barter, where some society is assumed to have existed that was so inconvenienced by the double coincidence of interests/wants/needs that it invented money. This never happened as there exists no evidence that a society existed that used barter as its main method of exchange; barter was used on the edges of society, spot transfers made between people who did not have the trust necessary to support debts.

Here's the passage where he refers to 'time-lagged barter':

Local but extremely valuable trade was, this essay argues, made possible among many cultures by the advent of collectibles, by the time of the Upper Paleolithic. Collectibles substituted for otherwise necessary but non-existent trusting long term relationships. If there had existed a high degree of sustained interaction and trust between tribes, or individuals of different tribes, so that they gave each other unsecured credit, this would have stimulated time-lagged barter trade.

I did read the article. In fact, I read this article years ago shortly after it was published as back then I was an anarcho-capitalist, very interested in non-state solutions to money.

[samatman]

That's just a straightforward description of what barter is. Barter exists, it has the indicated limitations.

Szabo's argument is that collectibles predate history by tens of thousands of years, that rather than replacing some mythical bartering system, that a system of exchanged collectibles co-evolved with the entire concept of trade.

substituted for otherwise necessary but non-existent trusting long term relationships, as in, allowed them to exist in the first place, not replacing some barter-only system. Nick isn't crediting the Austrian origin mythos here, he's providing a cogent alternative to it.

What I'm seeing no evidence for, and don't expect to, is the claim that debt precedes collectible money. This is quite unlikely, as it seems to be a feature of sedentary agrarian cultures; it's difficult to picture it arising in a milieu of traveling bands of hunter-gatherers, who are mutually suspicious, often rivalrous, and may not speak the same language.