As important as money is to all people and organizations on earth, it is often misunderstood, seldom taught at schools, and is also the main topic of our website/blog. In writing this article I watched hours of video, read many articles, and decided that it would be useful to put a stake in the ground; so with a strong definition, a taxonomy of sorts, we can slowly look at the myths that have been built around money.
Simply put, money is a means of exchange. When I was a boy we often traded marbles, we bet them; we played games with them to see who would “win all the marbles” and we assigned different value to different kinds of marbles. There were the clear, glass looking ones, and the ones with beautiful swirls and even the shiny metal ones, and the big fat ones — for those of us good at playing, we knew their different uses, so the value wasn’t just aesthetic, we knew that having a big fat, heavy one in the middle would keep us in play for a long time, and then there was the technique in shooting the marbles, there were the knuckle shots for those with great skill, the nail flick, and so the value also changed with the skill and affinity of the player: some marbles were better for specific uses than others.
In that world, marbles were our money. I used to carry mine in a leather pouch, and my favorite ones were kept safely hidden in a tin with foam inside it so they wouldn’t get damaged, and hidden in my room so they wouldn’t get stolen. I used to trade both marbles and skill for yet more marbles, candy or even US bank notes, Dollars (yet another kind of money). I was good, very good, I slowly took over everyone’s marbles in my neighborhood, and soon some kids would pay me to borrow my marbles to play. I would size up the kid in a match and decide what kind of marbles I was willing to lend to him (usually him, sorry to the gender sensitive, we didn’t hang out with too many girls at that age and in that activity), I would determine what the risk to me would be, whether they won or lost. I became the bank. Soon I found the top players, and often after winning in a match with me, if they didn’t want to give up their marbles, they would get invited to join my gaming team, they got access to my cache, my training and some of my marbles. I was methodical in my selection of players. As we would go to school or other places where different neighborhoods would meet, I would look for the challengers. Over time we formed alliances with other teams.
You get the picture, in every sense I had every function of a bank, I was able to take “paper”: hand written notes as promises of paying back my marbles. I learned that I had to get actual written evidence as many kids would often back down after losing my marbles, then I learned I should have witnesses. It became important to establish order and rules so we didn’t end up with bloody knuckles and noses and bruised egos and friendships. I even learned that it was a good idea to invite some of the big boys to my team, even if they weren’t good at the game, they provided the muscle and it was good for defense and collections.Â
It should be no surprise that when I discovered the game of Monopoly I was fascinated by it, and played it avidly. Monopoly introduced me to a few other concepts, or maybe just made things more evident; I soon discovered the importance of location, that row of properties right before passing Go was so incredibly expensive and alluring, and yet it was crazy to risk early ownership as often I wouldn’t have enough money for other things as the game progressed, so I learned the importance of having something everywhere on the board, to diversify both in location and in asset type, and I learned that strategy had to include a mix of risk-taking, patience and sometimes plain luck.
You would think that with this type of affinity I would have grown up into a financial career, but my love was computers and I pursued a Computer Science and math degree. As the years have gone by and with varied success in the real game of life (oh wait wrong game, I mean monopoly 🙂 ) I wanted to create a collection of articles, videos and information that can help us become educated about money.Â
In this inaugural article about what money is I also introduced a number of other topics, but it’s already a very long article, so let’s sum up this one and we will continue with a few follow ups. What is money?
-  Money is a medium of exchange, it’s anything the parties involved want it to be, marbles, monopoly game pieces, shells, and even government issued currency. (I like this article on Investopedia as a nice intro)
- Money has value assigned by those who use it for exchange. The more people who agree on the value, the more stable the money becomes.
- The unit of value of money can then be used to place value of other things. For example 10 clear marbles was the equivalent of 1 big fat one, except if the clear one was a rare one.
Money permeates every aspect of humanity on this world, and for those that believe in other worlds, I’m sure there’s a method of exchange there. Money has existed well before there were mints and central banks (more on this) and now with the concept of digital money (what a mind blow) everything is possible. Not to spoil the ending, but to me, crypto currency gives us the opportunity to become the kid on the playground with the ability to use their own skill to go for all the marbles.Â
GAME ON!
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