Money in its paper and coin form is becoming slowly redundant. How many of us now carry cash when you there are so many ways to pay for items electronically? We need Money to pay for goods and services plus to manage our debts and to be rewarded by employers so as to remunerate ourselves, but this is no longer in a solid form. This is why Coin Dealer UK companies like http://www.gmcoins.co.uk/have become so important in preserving the history of our money. When you consider that the only way to pay your gas bill was to actually go to the show room and pay in over the counter (usually out of your literal pay packet) as opposed to the simply use of a Direct Debt out of your account it seems hard to see how we can go on using it. With the introduction of Apple pay and Android pay plus online banking apps we have never been in more control of our accounts and the flow of money, albeit virtual, in and out. In Sweden for example they are already looking at the possibility of being a nation without physical money. With this is mind it’s no wonder numismatist’s like AUTHOR at LINK are eyeing the future for investments to store now.
Why do we need physical money? The simple basis for money in an economy comes from the fact that bartering is just a convoluted way of getting something. When we were all freehold farmers in the Neolithic period this was useful. If you wanted some goats for example and the farmer next door had some you would trade wheat, produce, other animals, tools or even a son or daughter in what accounted for marriage back then. Even then this is just conjecture we have no evidence that the barter system was the only means of trading. However, the development of commodity money is generally seen as an example of the steps to the development of or establishment of civilisation.
The first examples of Money being used for goods and services is the humble shekel in Mesopotamia. The birthplace of many civilisations such as the Babylonians and the Hitties but it was the Lydian’s of Anatolia who used gold and silver to distinguish values. This commodity money (for example Iron bars), being made of something of value in itself, is slowly changed to representative money, where the value is not the thing itself but what it represents, that we have today.
