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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kurotowa" data-source="post: 9499679" data-attributes="member: 27957">To my knowledge, there are two main drivers for using money: trust level and fungibility. Not a value threshold.When you're dealing with other people from your one little village that you've known all your life, you have a personal and long term relationship with them. The trust level is high, and you don't have to worry as much about defective goods or skipping out on a debt. But when you're dealing with a traveling merchant, or living in a larger urban center where you don't have that personal relationship with everyone, you need a way to secure the transaction. And the best security is cash up front.Fungibility, though, is what drives the use of money even in familiar circumstances. The farmer only needs the farrier to shoe his horse once a year, but the farrier needs bread from the baker every day, and the baker doesn't need any horses shod but does need a steady supply of firewood for the ovens, and so on. Money is a method for keeping an abstract score of labor done and owed that can be traded about to the persons and proportions needed. Trying to barter everything is hugely inefficient and often entirely impractical, and the past definitely wasn't some idyllic commune where everyone pitched it for everything.So yes, compensation was often in non-monetary forms. That doesn't mean it wasn't carefully enumerated, or that barter was anything but a fallback when everything else had failed.</blockquote>

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