Originally Posted by
Grummgug
No, money does not exist because government exists. The universal standard of currency for hundreds, thousands of years, has been 1 ounce of gold. The unit never changes. Sometimes, other currencies get invented using other materials. But they don't seem to last. You should read about the end of the Roman Empire. They started out using gold coins, then, in order to help pay for their massive social programs, they began to debase their currency. They developed complicated processes to pickle and boil metals together so that you would have a thin film of valuable metal coated on some cheap metal slug. Eventually, the Roman Empire collapsed.
Society went back to gold coins.
As I say, its similar to the SOJ economy in D2. Without currency, people create one on their own out of a fundamental need to trade. Blizzard didn't create the SOJ economy. It was grass roots. In the real world, the same thing occurs, but people will eventually default to gold and silver coins if physical currency is taken away.