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Why is currency so essential?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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Consider what we used as currency before it was currency. You would have to barter before, which was inefficient. Common currency saves you and everyone involved time. Instead of having to barter for every item, which would also require you to do carry all of those items, you can just pay with currency now.
I'll trade you 6 lima beans for a salt packet.
No, I need this salt for lima beans.
We can think of it as a universal language for trading. It doesn’t matter what item you eventually want, you can trade money to get it.
Extrapolating, want, or greed, is what gives money its value?
The ability to purchase items you want with money gives it value.
Want, greed, hunger, sickness, lust... nearly every flaw and benefit has been translatable to currency at some point in history. I feel like you're focused on the negative but, for instance, take my partner - they suffer from hypermobility and would be unable to build their own home (most of us would be unable arguably) currency allows us to make an exchange at the the absurd levels of value that equal a house without needing to shuffle around herds of thousands of cattle.
That's not exactly true. Barter was never used like that in the past. People used gift giving systems or other trust based systems in daily life. Barter was only used with strangers and that was not a common occurrence. These trust based systems do work in smaller settings but break down in large settings where interacting with strangers is the norm.
Time, agree, time is what is most essential to everyone here on this planet.
A lot of cultures ended up with effective currencies. Whether that was grains of rice or chickens there ended up a small number of items that had a well understood value and ended up being the default item of trade, not because the receiver needed those items but because they were known to be easily exchanged with others.