The History of Money in Ten Minutes. Number Two: Metal Money. Once people start using money to facilitate trade, whether in the form of shells, barley, feathers, or whales teeth, some useful characteristics of money become apparent. Barley, for example, is heavy to carry, so not portable or even durable.
Whales teeth are hard to split into two, so not easily divisible. Shells can be picked up on any beach, so not exactly scarce. And if the token standing as money doesn't have much intrinsic, like feathers, it's hard to trade outside your immediate community.
Another noticeable feature of money was that having a lot of it made you powerful, and power could get you a lot of it. So kings hit on the idea of minting coins from precious metals, stamping them with an emblem that guaranteed their weight and value. Metal money ticked all the money boxes and because it had intrinsic value, it could be used to trade with other communities.
But the success of metal money brought temptation, and sovereigns soon realized that by slimming down the coins or slipping cheaper base metals into the mix, they could make money by circulating debased currency worth less than face value.
