Digital Money! The evolution of money.

Money is not an innovative or exclusive concept of the contemporary era. The exchange of some goods by others was a consequence of the specialization of the trades centuries ago: each person was engaged in a task, they were not self-sufficient and needed the results of others' work to get what they lacked.

This system although practical, had some limitations had to find another that wanted part of your surplus and that at the same time had something of interest for you. The perception of the value of goods by both parts also had to be aligned. It is not surprising that certain types of goods were soon coined as references in the exchange, such as stone, grain or cattle, thousands of years before Christ.

Over time, these primitive forms of money evolved to converge into easily storable, transportable, divisible, unalterable and non-perishable goods.These criteria are widely met with precious metals, with gold, silver and copper being the most popular. Given the differences in the purity of the same, they soon began to demand mechanisms to guarantee the value of the pieces, in the form of stamps or marks, giving way to the first coins around 600 B.C.

Later, the value was attested by the proportion of the precious metal with respect to the content of other metals in the currency itself. There came a time when the inclusion of precious metals was too expensive, so they began to use cheaper metal coins that represented gold reserves in banks or similar structures, until giving way to paper money with the appearance of the printing press.

Throughout history money has simply been a representative of the assets of a community, be it a town or a country. This stopped being so when Nixon eliminated the gold standard in 1971, declaring the value of the dollar in terms of other currencies. We thus entered the era of fiduciary money: not linked to any physical good, but to the confidence of the rest of the markets in that currency.

The value of current money rests precisely in that confidence that it will be accepted as a means of payment by others, and in that the economic authorities have specifically determined that it is legal tender.