From Cattle to Cryptocurrency: Offcloud’s History of Money (Part 3)

Money may still be a mystery to many. But hopefully a little less mysterious for most of you who have read our last couple of blog posts. We are now in the third part of a series of four that retraces the history of money. If you have not yet read Parts 1 and 2, you can read them all right here and here, respectively. Then come back to this third blog post to continue our journey.

The comeback of the fallen paper money

China had invented paper money and had used it for about half a millennium before they abandoned it. In the meantime, the rest of the world, especially Europe, was still using coins. They kept minting more and more money helped by their acquisitions of precious metals from their conquests and colonizations.

While international trading flourished around medieval Italy and Flanders, the difficulty of securely transporting large sums of money over long distances led to money traders using promissory notes instead. This became the predecessor to regular banknotes that we know of today.

The first paper banknotes

Even if paper money became known in Europe around the 13^th Century through the accounts Marco Polo and other travelers, it was not until 1661 that the first European banknotes were used. Stockholms Banco, a predecessor of the Bank of Sweden, first issued the modern-day banknotes.

The rise and fall of the gold standard

In 1816 England, gold officially became the standard value of money. Several years later, the United States followed their lead and enacted the Gold Standard Act of 1900 which established gold as the only standard for redeeming paper money and ending bimetallism, which had previously allowed silver in exchange for gold. This act also led to the establishment of a central bank.

However, just a few years later, the 1930s Depression marked the beginning of the collapse of the gold standard. As the gold standard was revised, the gold became devalued as a consequence. Not long after, the British and international gold standard ended and the complexities of international monetary regulations began.

The historical collapse of the gold standard may have greatly contributed to a significant rise of concerns about a brewing collapse of our current system. However, with crises comes opportunities. Be sure to read the final article that details an innovative and disruptive technological advancement that can usher a new way of doing commerce.

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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?