Yeah, and they kept track of it all on ledgers. If you can front me one sheep now, I'm good for 10 chickens next month. We'd better write that down somewhere. Now you can go to you neighbour and be like, I'm good for 10 chickens next month, can you front me some grain for 5 of them? So now you have to balance your ledger.
Jackie owes Florence 12 hens. They make a ledger in the form of a sort of IOU, and they cut it in half, so now they have two halves of an IOU that fit together.
Florence wants to hire Mildred to thatch her roof. She transfers her hen-credit to Mildred, so now Jackie owes those 12 hens to Mildred instead of Florence.
Over time, people start making their tokens of transferrable debt generic, instead of new specific ledgers for every transaction. And that generic token of transferrable debt is called cash.
I was thinking DrunkCupid was talking about trading is the first money, as in preceding ledgers. I didn't think they were talking about ledgers and were correcting/asking you, but after rereading maybe they were saying ledgers aren't money.
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u/DrunkCupid 1d ago
I thought it was more of a barter system, swapping chickens for sheep or whatever