We have been using money in one form or another since people began bartering food, material for tools and articles for decoration using amber, obsidian, sea shells and ochre more than 100,000 years ago. Traders in China and India developed the idea of money using cowry shells.
And now we have credit and debit cards, mobile (cell) phones and the Internet which are replacing coins and paper money rapidly. This also avoids the need for foreign currency and travelers' cheques.
Two of the largest credit card companies have also been among the best investments.
Visa's initial public offering (IPO), in March 2008, was $44 per share on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol (V). In 2015, Visa executed a 4-for-1 stock split, meaning each original share became four shares, and the price per share was divided by four. So, Visa's IPO price corrected for stock splits is $11 per share.
If you had invested in 100 shares at the IPO, in September 2005 you would have a capital gain of $33737 (not including dividends) - $4400 = $29337.
Mastercard's IPO was $39.00 per share when it went public in May 2006 trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol (MA). On January 22, 2014 the stock split 10-for-1.On 2025 Sep 26, MA stock closed at US$ 337.37.So if you bought 100 shares at the IPO price of $39 in 2006, after the split, you would hold 1,000 shares with a total value in September 2005 at $565.13 per share of $565,130. That's a remarkable 1439% return on the original investment!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU6NaDs-7ww
Money (cash) is a more convenient way of exchanging goods or services than bartering. As village markets grew, sellers and buyer devised ways to measure quantities and began recording transactions so there was no later arguing that the buyer or seller had been short-"changed".
Quantities, values and debts were recorded by notches on sticks, knots in string, or marks on baked clay storage pots and clay tablets. The first recorded use of a unit of weight and currency was the shekel in Babylon, Mesopotamia, (Iraq) in 3000 BCE. It was a weight of barley and a specified weight of silver, bronze or copper. About 1760 BCE The Code of Hammurabi specified legal rules concerning debt, private property, contracts and codes of business practices.
Metal was used as money because it was durable, portable, easily divisible and scarce. Initially, pieces of gold, silver, copper and tin were used. The Egyptians were using gold bars of a fixed weight as a money about 3000 BCE, while the Chinese were using bronze coins in the shape of cowrie shells, miniature bronze knives and spades (to indicate their value) from about 1000 BCE.
The Greeks stamped coins with markings from about 700 BCE; about the same time the Chinese were casting coins with square holes in the centre so that they could be strung like beads. Disk-shaped, gold, silver or bronze coins with an image on both sides (often the head of a king) became common. The Greek silver mines and silver coinage were two of the reasons the Athenian Empire dominated the Mediterranean sea in the 5th century BCE. A temple built for the goddess Moneta, in the 4th century BCE, became a Roman mint and the source of the English words money and mint. The French word for money is argent which also means silver.
Money allowed wealth to be stored in a non perishable form and it was easily hidden and transported. It also permitted more graduated pricing for trades and trading for foods like apples and fish when seasons did not coincide. Early civilizations made standard coins to facilitate trade and payment of taxes and it didn't take long before the production of coins was controlled by rulers who realized that they could make money by debasing the coins; reducing the weight of gold and substituting cheaper silver or other metals while maintaining the same face value.
Money evolved from a coin being a unit of weight (think pounds Sterling) to being a unit of value. This caused problems as gold and silver could be scraped from the periphery of the coins and also because of changes in the relative value of silver, gold and copper. In England in the 1670's CE, the value of a gold guinea coin began to rise compared to the silver crown coin, causing an increase in silver exports in exchange for gold imports. In the 1730's the Bank of England guaranteed to change silver money into gold at a fixed rate which, in a moment of crisis, almost caused a run on the bank as customers demanded their silver money be changed into gold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNOg24-DtQA
The idea of banknotes was introduced in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907) when merchants and wholesalers wanted to avoid the heavy bulk of copper coinage for large commercial transactions. However, the earliest banknotes were printed during Song dynasty China during the 11th century and, by the early 12th century, the banknotes issued in each year were equivalent to 26 million strings of copper coins. And the sentence for the crime of forgery was death.
Money has no intrinsic value and typically changes in value over time, sometimes quite drastically. Typically, this is currency inflation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBZZeaoC2Fk
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