The Evolution of Money

Before money, there was barter. Before barter, there was survival.

Small bands of humans—let’s call them tribes—each had something the other wanted. One tribe lived by the river and had the best fish. Another controlled the land with the ripest fig trees.

The problem? Trading a bundle of figs for a fish was inefficient. What if one side had nothing the other wanted? And so, “money” (if you can even call it that yet) was born. Not paper bills or gold coins, but anything that could be used as a stand-in for value.

The simplest answer? Force.

The fishing tribe, having more men, might take what they want. Or the fig tribe, skilled in archery, might decide they want the river for themselves.

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This is the real miracle of money: without it, the only alternative is violence. Without money, power decides who eats and who starves, who wins, and who loses. But with money, trade becomes cooperative, and civilization becomes possible.

So the evolution of money continued onward. From pure barter, we moved to “barter money,” which is basically an item that is perceived as valuable - seashells, for instance - that could basically be utilized as a reflection of value. However, seashells are not perfect for this task, as they are not uniform in size or quality.

Enter gold & silver. The beauty of gold (and silver) is that it’s easily divisible (it’s a soft metal), it is precious (rare), and it is easily carried about in small increments. It was (and is) an incredible store of value. Suddenly, the fish tribe could sell their fish to the fig tribe for some accepted amount of gold or silver, and it was a fair exchange.

Now, here begins the slow descent of currency. At some point, kings and emperors realized it was difficult to finance their wars with hard currencies, and so they started diluting the quality of the metal. Now you have gold + some worthless metal put together, and people have realized the difference. And so the King would issue a fiat - “a formal authoriztion or decree” - that said everybody had to use the debased currency as if it were just as good as the real thing.

At this point, two things happen. First, if you personally hold both pure metal currencies and debased currencies and have to “treat them both as equivalent,” you’re more likely to use the debased coin than the good one. Right? because one is qualitatively better than the other. Well, that’s what happened.

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Debasement, in other words, preceded our current system of deflating currency values via printing. As long as we’ve had kings and governments that needed to finance expensive wars, we’ve had this attempt to debase whatever our currency is.

At some point, goldsmiths started operating as the first lenders. They would hold gold for other people since they already had secure vaults and storage for their own gold and started to give out paper receipts worth X amount of gold, which people would utilize. From here, we swiftly proceeded to proper banking institutions where you deposited your gold in return for a receipt that could be exchanged for gold. But ultimately, we got to the point that banks were lending out more than they had on hand - in the assumption that nobody would ever withdraw 100% of the stockpile.

As we know, this led to bank runs. Bank runs, in my opinion, led to concerns about the overall stability of the system, which was the impetus to form the central bank. Once we had a central bank, we could print money and debase the currency, especially when we had moved entirely to “fiat” currency.

Okay—that is a very brief history of money, heavily abbreviated and not given its due space. So, in a world where currencies are constantly devalued, where do you store wealth? What survives when money itself loses meaning?

Second, real estate has value beyond the fact that it’s scarce. It produces economic value. So you have a scarce asset that also produces income. Unlike gold, which just sits there, real estate is productive. These two facts make real estate a fantastic store of value.

To prove this point, let’s compare land values in the Roman Empire to those today, measured in gold.

Historical records suggest that a small plot of farmland in Ancient Rome—about 0.65 acres—cost roughly 1,000 to 4,000 sestertii. That might not mean much to us today, but when converted to gold, it equates to about 75 to 300 grams of gold, which in modern prices equates to $4,800 to $19,200.

A modest home in a Roman town? Around 7.5 kg of gold (~$480,000 today). A luxurious countryside villa? 75 kg+ of gold ($4.8M+ in today’s terms).

Now, here’s where things get interesting. When measured in gold, land prices have remained remarkably stable for 2,000 years. Farmland in modern America costs roughly the same in gold as it did in ancient Rome. But in fiat currency, land has skyrocketed in price—not because land itself has changed, but because money has lost value.

This is the ultimate proof of real estate as a hedge against inflation. Empires rise and fall, and currencies are debased and printed into oblivion, but land endures. It holds its value across centuries, shielding wealth from the destructive effects of money printing.

So, when people ask, Why real estate?—this is why. It’s the one asset that has outlived every currency in human history.