[moscovium]

"Before money we had to barter, which led to the double coincidence of wants problem. When everyone accepts the same money you can buy something from someone even if they don’t like the stuff you own."

Stopped reading right here. Anthropologists have widely discredited any ideas that "before money we had barter", but it's just shyly asserted as absolute fact.

If you're going to argue something isn't money, you should first have a correct idea of what is money.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Wait, then what did people do before the current system?

[speeder]

When I was researching this subject, what I found out is that the path was:

1. Gift based economy. Where people aren't really giving gifts... this still exists in some parts of the world, basically if you accept the "gift", you are now in debt, and is expected to do something in return, not necessarily immediately. In small villages it makes sense, for example the hunter "gifts" everyone with the meat he hunted, increasing his social standing, so when he needs medical attention, the medic will take care of him, because he is socially in debt to the hunter. In a modern economy this instead can be disastrous, for example I have a cousin that visited France, and was horrified when african immigrants kept following him and his wife, hugging him forcefully, and trying to put random crap (it was some beads to wear around the wrist) on his hands and saying it is a gift, meanwhile when a nearby tourist did take the object, they demanded a 50 euro "gift" back.

2. When society is too big to be "social standing based", currency shows up rather quickly, when you can't remember everyone or use everyone's fame as currency, you need something easier to track, can be objects (rocks, salt, gold, whatever) or a ledger (numbers on a piece of clay, bank account, bitcoin, whatever), or both.

3. Barter shows up AFTER currency, because people use the currency to know the value of what they are bartering, for example a guy wants to buy a house, and doesn't have 3 tons of salt required, so he says he will offer you this gold bar worth 1 ton of salt, his horses worth the other ton of salt, and 5 years of his work worth the last ton of salt.

Here is a reasonable article on the subject, I remember vaguely it was one of my sources at the time, it is not the best source, but is the one that pointed me in the right direction.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...

[ARandumGuy]

If you'll accept a Wikipedia link, this gives a basic overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money#Prehistory:_p...

In short, while bartering likely did exist in some forms, it was not the primary means of commerce. Within a tribe or group of people, a 'gift economy' was generally used. This makes sense, as an average pre-historic tribe had like 50 people, making a complicated economic system unnecessary.

When civilization started to form, primitive forms of money came along with it. There was never a time when you went to the market with a handful of wheat and some furs, and hoped to trade them for some salt and fruit. That idea was popularized by Adam Smith in the 1700s, who was an economist, not an anthropologist.

[alexilliamson]

The book "Debt: The 5000 Years" laboriously debunks the idea that early cultures bartered, then realized they needed money. I don't have more details unfortunately because it's been a while since I read it (and it's quite dense). I remember being convinced of the logic though!