That's largely ahistorical, though: no historian or anthropologist thinks this is how money arose. You sometimes see shadow currencies evolve out of the breakdo

That's largely ahistorical, though: no historian or anthropologist thinks this is how money arose. You sometimes see shadow currencies evolve out of the breakdown of liberal capitalist societies--in prisons, times of famine, mass inflation, etc.--to make barter more fluid. The picture history paints, however, is one where money is typically invented by a ruling elite to use as a unit of account and as a way to extract taxes from the peasantry to fund military ventures.