Hacker News Reader

Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

What a coinkidink, I just finished watching episode 2 of "Connections" with James Burke which mentions this in the beginning of the episode, when talking about the invention of currency. The article from Egypt Today doesn't seem to mention the discovery of touchstone (which the episode does), which seemed like an important detail of "why gold?".

Seems it's available on the Internet Archive too: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e02

View on HN

Thanks for posting! Burke uses the term "barter", which is wrong. Before coinage, people used credit. Barter was extremely rare.

What do you mean? The credit is settled either in barter or coinage, isn't it?

It necessarily has a unit of account, but you can undertake all kinds of transactions under a credit system with nobody involved exchanging, or intending to exchange, that actual thing (silver coins, goats, bails of flax, abstract “favors”, whatever)

> Before coinage, people used credit. Barter was extremely rare.