Replying to Avatar Kc

I think an "invention" usually is done by one person or a small group that searches for a solution for a certain problem. But language was not created this way. It just appears and it also changes without anyone doing this intentionally.

I think the same goes with money. There was nobody who just said "these sea shells will now be used to trade everything against it". It's more like a habit that developed between more and more people until it was accepted by a whole society.

You could say metal coins and paper money where invented. But not money itself.
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ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 2y ago

money is just a metric of debt and credit between two people, you do something for me, i do something for you, if i'm doing all the work you owe me

without hard supply limits on money this allows those who have a privileged position in the money creation can be "square" by the monetary unit but actually be in debt to the others

that's why hardness is important and why fiat is so bad - just a mechanism for theft

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Kc 2y ago

That's a completely different aspect of money than we were discussing previously. What I'm saying is, that the earliest types of money came up by convention and not by someone inventing it.

So maybe someone wanted to have something (maybe a certain tool or something to eat) someone else had, but all he had were some rare type of sea shells. The sea shells themselves are not useful for anything, but eventually the "seller" of the tool found the shells nice to look at. Then he found someone else who wanted to trade against the shells and after some time the convention developed that sea shells could be used to trade things that people wanted.

This is completely different from a single person inventing something.