Salt as Money

When considering this definition, with my addition of disinfectant, we can see how salt became money too...

Aristotle identified 5 essential attributes that are necessary for a money:  It has to be durable, divisible, convenient, consistent, and have value in itself. 

I've added antibiotic as an element for these reasons:

And if something has more attributes, rather unseen, then all the better.  For example, gold and silver are antibiotic.  That is to say when merchants make a payment, the medium they use, when the trade from hand to hand, is antibiotic.  This suppresses the spread of disease.  Silver does this as well, and copper and nickel to a much lesser degree.  And curiously, as atomic scientists have discovered more elements over the last two centuries, those that have antibiotic properties end up being offered as coins, such as rhodium and platinum, those elements that have no antibiotic properties for some reason never make it into the form of coin such as tantulum and iridium (except in novelty quantities).

and disinfectant

There is a definition I’ll add, that Aristotle could not have noticed, a characteristic I noticed: money is disinfectant.  Since money is usually used in international trade, while the goods laden on the vessel or camel are transferred to another conveyance, the merchant captain and the broker actually trade metal (gold or silver).  The disease on the hands of the traders are killed by the medium of exchange.  What is interesting is as new metals are discovered, the ones that are antibiotic are made into coins and the others are not.

Salt is not as durable as gold, in fact is is consumable, divisible, convenient, not as consistent as gold (very many kinds and grades), and has value in itself, and is both disinfectant and antibiotic on many forms.

Salt can be made more valuable than gold, and thus used as money, by hegemon-enforced monopoly. It can also emerge by itself, but it is not ideal, and there is usually gold and silver where salt is available.

Is salt money, or just a tally, if hegemon-sponsored?  Bad money drives out good, like bad food drives out good food.  Unless there is a free market, the salt is likely just tallies.  Otherwise, it too can be money. 

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