Before Banks, Before Markets, Before “Investing” - There Was This Coin.

As far as we know this is the oldest coin in history.

Around 600 BCE, in Lydia (modern Turkey), a group of traders did something new:

they stopped weighing metal and started trusting a stamp.

The first coins weren’t gold. They were electrum, a messy mix of gold–silver alloy, it had inconsistent value. It was economically imperfect. But it turns out their concept became socially revolutionary.

For the first time in humanity a symbol, a stamp mattered more than the material it was made from.

A lion’s head guaranteed the coin. Authority replaced measurement.

At this point in time, strangers could now trade without negotiation.

Interestingly these coins didn’t first appear in banks, they appear in temples.

This money needed moral permission before it needed efficiency, the animals stamped celebrated the gods.

Later, King Croesus did fix the material flaw by minting pure gold and silver coins, turning trust into something portable, countable, and scalable.

Today?

We’ve reverted back to mixed alloy coins as the value of raw metals outstripped the currency denoted to it (Inflation at it finest).

However the pattern hasn’t changed:

Money isn’t about value.

It’s about coordination at scale.

What’s your all time favourite coin?