A History of Money: From Cowrie Shells to Bitcoin
Money didn't grow out of barter — that's a myth anthropologists debunked long ago. The real story is far stranger: it runs from debt records in Mesopotamia through cowrie shells, giant stones on the island of Yap, the first coins in Lydia and Chinese banknotes, all the way to the Jáchymov thaler, the Nixon Shock, and Bitcoin. Five thousand years of experiments circling a single question: what are we willing to believe in?