Universal Money

The Problem:

My honey for your goat? How do you overcome the limitations of bartering? It’s hard to do fairly, it’s hard to do with strangers, and it’s hard to do if you are a specialist (not everyone likes honey).

The Insight:

If we can all agree that an item (e.g., this barley) is worth something, then it can be exchanged freely for anything else.

The Idea:

Universal money! “The most universal and efficient system of trust ever devised. “Money is not a tech breakthrough, but a psychological one”. It started with barley, but has had many iterations from cowry shells, to modern currencies, to prison cigarettes.

Source:Sapiens