You will hear a college lecturer talking to a class of business students about the history of money and its functions. As yo

Man: Good morning, everyone. In today’s class we’ll talk about the history of money and its functions.
Money’s got a very colourful history, because a number of things have been used in the place of what we use as money. Feathers, shells, cloth... In Roman times the Roman soldiers were paid in salt and that’s how we get the word salary, from the Latin sal for salt. And a number of tribes used cattle, which were useful because they were transportable. But they were quite bulky and you weren’t always sure of the size of cattle you were going to get, so there was a problem of quality.
In the ninth century in China we had paper money for the first time. It wasn’t quite the paper money that we know now, it was more like a piece of paper saying a promise to pay. And then in the seventh century we had money in the form of precious metal. There was always a problem of making sure that the coin that you got had enough precious metal in it to give it value. When things got tough, you often found some civilisations were quite good at what they called sweating the money, which was effectively taking out the precious metal content so that what you got actually wasn’t what you thought you got.
And we have a form of that here in Australia when we had the holey dollar... when we had a coin with a hole in the middle because there was a shortage of metal. And in those days, Spanish coins were used a lot. Sometimes stores used certain tokens because there was a shortage of actual coinage. And then there is money as we know it today in notes and coins — plastic notes. And of course, if we were doing this programme in a hundred years time, we might talk about quaint little things called money, notes and coins, because all we’d be using would be plastic cards.
We look at the functions of money. Firstly it’s a medium of exchange, so it’s some commodity which facilitates the exchange of goods and services. lt is also a unit of account, which means that we use money to reckon prices and reckon values for comparisons between goods and services or over time. And thirdly, money is a store of value. It is an asset. It’s something that we can use to store value away to be retrieved at a later point in time. So we cannot consume today, we can hold money instead — and transfer that consumption power to some point in the future.