What If Money Was Never Invented? Your Whole Life Runs on Who Trusts You.

In 1970 Ireland's four biggest banks shut from May 1 to November 17, and the country kept trading on checks that nobody could cash for months. This episode follows that story back to how money really began. Adam Smith said it started with barter, but anthropologists never found the barter village. What they found was people keeping score, from clay receipts in Mesopotamia to the English tally sticks that set Parliament on fire in 1834. The second half is labeled speculation. It imagines a world where money was never invented, once as the best version anyone could hope for and once as the worst, and then pushes both versions to 2026. Full sources and archival credits are in the YouTube description.