Sphere No.44 (Mar 2018)

Sphere #44 2018 09 COVER STORY AdVANCEMENT Money, Money, Money oney. There is nothing like it. It is as necessary to civilisation as the invention of the wheel and fire, and yet is a completely imaginary construct. Someone, somewhere, came up with the idea that one thing could be used to represent the value of everything, freeing us from the constraints of barter. That person then got others to buy into that vision, and money was born. From cowrie shells to digital payment, money has moved with the times. Sphere takes a walk through the history of money and takes a peek into its future. Barter got the job done for primitive societies, but was hugely limiting. What was bartered had to be transported, making large-scale barter impractical. Money is the invisible glue that holds societies together. Sphere takes a walk through the history of money and onwards to the newAnt Financial–CKHH joint venture, AlipayHK. Goods like tools, weapons and animal skins may have been exchanged, but lacked most of money’s principal benefits as: • a medium of exchange • a unit of accounting, allowing us to put a price on something and measure our access to resources • a store of value – that is, it persists over time. Proto-currencies with some form of standard measure included things like cattle and salt, but these lacked the full benefits of money per se. Early currencies based on pre-existing objects (that is, not produced to be money) included shells, like cowrie shells, that could be threaded together on string. From Africa to China, M