Andrej Karpathy's Review of The History of Money

“This book is a relatively short whirlwind tour of some aspects of the history of money, presented chronologically from antiquity to approx. 1997, when this book was published. Basically, due to a number of properties of asset creation in society (e.g. role of skill/expertise, need for up-front investment in production, batch efficiencies, etc.) various assets regularly end up in surplus or scarcity for any one person or organization, leading to a need for some system of exchange. Money fills this need and becomes the scalar signal that communicates scarcity across society in an emergent, decentralized manner. The book goes over multiple forms of money that have existed over the course of history stopping by different places of spacetime in each chapter. It touches on gift economy and debt in small societies in presence of trust, barter in cases of lack of trust, early commodity money that typically has intrinsic value and is a convenient means of exchange (e.g. cacao seeds used in the