In economics, everything begins with currency. To maintain its role as a universal equivalent, a currency must be constant, not fungible, something that cannot be guaranteed by its material dimension. However precise the forge, no two coins are ever exactly the same weight.
That is why in the sixth century BC, the Lydian kings (Alyattes and Croesus) introduced the minted coin (croesids) as a chrematistic tool, prohibiting it from being weighed, in order that only the symbol, the mark of its producer (a lion’s head on one side and a hallmark on the other), should carry the symbolic value of the object.
However, the theory of natural equivalence between the face value of the currency and the intrinsic value of the metal, particularly in ancient societies, predominated throughout the nineteenth century. Adam Smith argued this in the first book of The Wealth of Nations (1776) and Theodor Mommsen, the nineteenth-century historian of antiquity, still endorses it. It was not until 1958, after thirty-two years of opinionated research, that the Swedish historian Sture Bolin (1900-1963) demonstrated that the Lydian coins were only 54 percent gold, while the native electrum collected in the mud of the river Pactolus contained 70 percent. The Lydian coins were therefore melted down and turned into alloys. The Greeks, the Romans, and all the states after them up to the America of Richard Nixon (1971) never stopped increasing the face value of the currency at the expense of its value in metal…