Brief History of money
At the Show me the Money exhibition I was intrigued by the How We Got To Where We Are Timeline by Jane Lawson. This articulates the development of the global financial system since the evolution of homo sapiens. It was created by Jane Lawson in an attempt to understand the roots of the 2007/2008 financial crash and draws on various sources, including newspapers, documentaries such as The Inside Job (2010) and books including The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein; Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester; and 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang.
From this I considered the vast change in currency from bartering to bitcoin At the dawn of humanity, bartering was used in lieu of money to buy goods. As early man began to rear domestic livestock, one of the earliest forms of barter included cattle, sheep, as well as vegetables and grain. The first known currency was created by King Alyattes in Lydia, now part of Turkey, in 600BC. The first coin ever minted features a roaring lion. Coins then evolved into bank notes around 1661 AD. The first credit card was introduced in 1946.
The infographic below provided by Bartercard shows how money has developed from these early roots through to Apple's instant iPhone payments and bitcoin - the world's first decentralised cryptocurrency. This provides me with a succinct overview of moneys history and evolution, the brief itself is more about the revitalisation of tangible money as opposed to its extensive history, I can take inspiration from this timeline of money as a result of human evolution however want to focus my resolution on how to extend this concept of money based on my understanding of these outdated currency methods.
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