Published in  
Finance
 on  
5/9/0202

The Barter System

For many years, the globe was used to utilizing the barter payment system, in which one product was swapped for another and transactions were carried out in the absence of actual denominations of coin. Despite the convenience of being able to utilize household objects to acquire products or services, there are a number of impracticalities associated with using the barter system.

To begin with, it is quite difficult to give a suitable and precise value to an item under the barter system. For example, if I go to the market and buy one goat for three chickens, while my friend goes to another market and buys one goat for twelve chickens, what is the genuine worth of the goat? Because of the high degree of unpredictability, it is difficult to determine what the real worth of the product was. When utilizing real coin denominations, you may simplify the entire procedure since it signals that the money is the same, and each 1 gold coin carries the same worth in the vendor’s eyes.

Another downside of something like the barter system is the fact that it makes postponed payments difficult. For example, if I took out a loan for six birds, the valuation of the birds would depreciate over time, because the physical health of the birds would typically decrease as they grew older and were subjected to many more external factors.

Humanity has gone a long way since the days of birds and goats. The adoption of monetary currencies not only made life simpler for sellers, but it also ensured that customers could keep their money over the long term – in many other words, it made life easier for all parties engaged in the sales cycle.