From Cattle to Cryptocurrency: Offcloud’s History of Money (Part 2)

Do you know that the earliest form of money was cattle? If not, then perhaps you might want to read Part 1 of this blog post series right here. In that article, we retraced the historical forms of money up to the earliest predecessor of the modern-day coins that is still in circulation today. Then come back here to read the rest of the story.

Imperial coins

When the first coins appeared as early as 2000 B.C., they were made of heavy metals such as bronze. They were also shaped like cattle, reminiscent of the first form of money. Moreover, their value was determined by their actual weight. All these characteristics made them too cumbersome to carry around.

Around 650 B.C., coins with their value imprinted on them were first introduced in Lydia, which is present day Turkey. This practice soon spread around the ancient empires of Greece, Persia, and Macedonia, and further used in the Roman empires. These new coins were made from precious metals like gold and silver and bore the imprints of gods and emperors to mark their authenticity.

Paper currency

Paper was not the first material used for banknotes. When China had a shortage of metal coinage, due to its relatively recent technology, the Chinese resorted to a short-lived experiment using leather as money to temporarily supplement coinage issues.

Around 806 A.D., the first known paper currency appeared in China. Since this was much easier to manufacture, distribute and carry around, it easily grew in popularity. The next problem was that as paper money grew in production, they were also issued irresponsibly. Their value rapidly depreciated and inflation soared that by 1455 A.D. China had given up using the paper money for the next hundreds of years.

We have just ended the first half of our journey. Do you want to know what happened next? You will read about the comeback of paper money in the third installment of this blog post series. Then, on the fourth and final installment, we will take a hard look at our current form of money and what the future of currency has in store for us. So stay tuned for the second half of the adventure!

Offcloud, your cloud-based download manager

Here at Offcloud, we provide an invaluable cloud-based service to all our users, going above and beyond the simple storage that most places have to offer! We also give our users the opportunity to download instantly from BitTorrent directly into your cloud storage account, fetch cloud data to convert and store for use later on, and even make use of the media you’ve saved while you’re on the go.

You can do all this with a free account, too, giving you the opportunity to really try out the service before deciding to make a financial commitment to a bigger package with extra features! You’ll receive 10GB of storage space and 100 direct download links, so why not give us a go?