Video transcript

Did you know, people didn't always use money to pay for things? But what did they use instead? And why was money invented? Let's take a quick trip back in time to find out.

A long time ago... Hey, not that long ago. That's better.

A long, long time ago. Before money existed. People used bartering. Instead of paying with coins, notes, cards or going contactless they would swap things you had for things they needed. Imagine you needed some eggs and you owned a cow. You'd have to find someone to do a swap with. But this wasn't always easy. What if the egg seller didn’t want to cow? And how many eggs is a whole cow worth anyway? That's quite a lot of eggs.

This made trading tricky. So to make things simpler, people started using a new currency. Precious materials and valuable items from nature, like cowrie shells or precious metals like gold and bronze, were used as early forms of money in some parts of the world people even use shark teeth. Yikes. I don’t want to think about how they got the hands on those.

These early forms of money were worth something. But still, it wasn't perfect. Not everyone could agree on the value. Over many years, people came up with all sorts of ways to pay. But then coins were invented. This changed everything. Coins and paper had a value that everyone agreed on. This meant that all people knew exactly how much each one was worth, so no one had to guess how much something cost.

This made paying for things much fairer. Phew, coins and notes worked so well that we still use them today, many, many years later. Kerching! We can zoom forward to today where there are many ways to pay.

If you go shopping, you may want to use a card. The money comes directly from your bank, so you don't need to carry wads of notes and coins with you. Or if you don't want to carry cards, you can use contactless payments.

You can just tap your smartphone or hold up to a special machine, bing! Just like that, you've paid. Next time you go shopping, take a look at how your grown-ups pay for things.

Did they use coins, cards on their phone? Or did they bring a cow to trade? Now, that would be udderly silly.