I the early stages of humanity people already were in need of exchanging goods because they couldn’t self-provide the whole range of products they needed for daily life. There were people spending a good portion of their time hunting food or collecting food and materials. There were people manufacturing goods like tools or clothing. There were people staying at home, taking care of the offspring and preparing meals. Those people had to share the results of their work with others. They were in need of something only someone else can provide, and only they could provide things someone else would hopefully be in need of. They started exchanging their goods.

After a while they probably found that it would be easier to have a least common denominator for sharing goods, so they utilized shells or certains stone as what we would call “currency” nowadays.

We all know the metal coins and paper bills we’ve grown to love or hate. In my childhood our currency was the “German Mark”, later replaced by the “Euro”. A big benefit of this type of physical currency is the ability to buy goods anonymously if given directly and that it is hardly traceable who spent money at which place at a certain time. But…

But sometimes it becomes inconvenient. In our digitalized and networked world people increasingly want to order goods over this large computer network you might’ve heard about. They want to do online shopping over the internet. A non-physical way of transferring money is wished for. This need is addressed by credit cards, for example. In some sense the credit card is the opposite of phsyical currency. You don’t have to transfer it manually which is pretty convenient. But on the downside it certainly isn’t anonymous. The credit card company can trace every purchase and easily create profiles about your (financial) life.

I don’t want to go too much into it and I certainly don’t want to evaluate about good or evil. But I want to address the evolution of money and mention the next logical step: Bitcoin. Bitcoin eliminates two of the main disadvantages of physical money and credit cards. Within the scope of this article I can’t go into deep detail, but at least should be mentioned that with Bitcoins evolution eliminated the need of physical transfer as well as the possibility of transaction tracing. For a nice overview you can have a look at the Wikipedia Article.

There is a big discussion going on whether Bitcoin is a blessing or curse for humanity. Some say it could unite markets, others say it will bring the downfall of or economy. But I think evolution naturally will show us the fittest of the currencies that will be able to survive and serve us in the future.