[mplanchard]

The idea of physical tender replacing bartering isn’t really accurate. See a fairly detailed discussion of pre-modern monetary systems here: https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...

TL;DR the concept of money and the concept of coinage are separate, with the former significantly predating the latter. Even after coins were a thing, most accounting was still done without them, especially for peasants:

> So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.

> Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

If that were true, and I'm not saying it isn't, how is that any different than the money we're discussing? Do you think that I trudge down to the bank, withdraw cash (if only it were still silver!), and buy lunch with that? Do I put some in my pocket to pay the mortgage later in the week (even if it's not at the same bank)?

The money is just expressed as debt that we all keep track of (some of us worse than others), and if we express the amounts in modern monetary units that's only because there's little else we could agree on to quantify it.

Nothing's changed really.

[mplanchard]

It’s not, but the comment I’m responding to said:

> I imagine a peasant of old moving from bartering to coins would 'like' money - would that be allowed by this author or be too gauche?

The idea of there being a solely barter-based economy is not well supported in general, and the idea that they switched from that to coins is also not correct.

I also think it likely that pre-modern people were also dissatisfied with the concept of money, whether coinage or not, in the same way we are now, while also recognizing its utility as a means of exchanging goods fairly over time.