Money as in the unit of account is something worth nothing, it must be worth nothing to act as a tool to evaluate the differences of value. This is liable to b

Money as in the unit of account is something worth nothing, it must be worth nothing to act as a tool to evaluate the differences of value. This is liable to be debated: but for example, gold is pretty worthless and the mechanism by which it was appraised as valuable, at least the explanation I find to be the most compelling, is the Chartalist position. Wherein the government issues the currency, but demands it back in the same currency units as tax. Otherwise, gold is sort of just a social status luxury good which you pay a lot of money for but is worthless in any other context. Prior to currency you could pay tax in various commodities or as corvée labor - it does however indicate an intrinsic and continuous debt to the state. Now if we look at the anthropological record the pretensions that people were bartering before the advent of currency disappears, and it appears that it was actually a system of credit/debt - of favors within a community. And that's where the issue arose. How do you guarantee an extension to a foreign party? A traveler or a soldier? And that appears to be when barter was deployed. I think this is an important aside here because it really does underline what money was intended for a guarantee. Of course there are other aspects like portability and storage that also contribute to the nicety of currency. Finally to the point, China was actually the first known culture and eventually nation to have deployed fiat currency, and it emerged from credit-derived checks. Those debts were transferred from one person to the next informally. "Tallies weren’t just used for loans, but for any sort of contract—which is why early paper contracts also had to be cut in half and one half kept by each party. With paper contracts, there was a definite tendency for the creditor’s half to function as an IOU and thus become transferable. By 806 AD, for instance, right around the apogee of Chinese Buddhism, merchants moving tea over long distances from the far south of the country and officials transporting tax payments to the capital, all of them concerned with the dangers of carrying bullion over long distances, began to deposit their money with bankers in the capital and devised a system of promissory notes. They were called “Flying Cash,” also divided in half, like tallies, and redeemable for cash in their branches in the provinces. They quickly started passing from hand to hand and operated something like currency. The government first tried to forbid their use, then a year or two later—and this became a familiar pattern in China—when it realized that it could not suppress them, switched gears and established a bureau empowered to issue such notes themselves."[0],[1] [0] Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_cash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_cash