An open ledger / 12 eras
From shells to ledgers to code, a short walk through how money changed and what that tells us about what comes next.
Begin the timeline ↓01 / 12
More than 3,000 years ago
China
Cowrie shells, and later bronze copies of them, served as money. A small, tough, hard to fake object let people trade without swapping goods.
Source: en.wikipedia.org. Date and historical account.
02 / 12
About 650 to 575 BCE
Lydia, western Anatolia
Rulers stamped lumps of electrum, a natural blend of gold and silver, to vouch for weight and purity. Buyers stopped weighing metal and trusted the mark.
Source: en.wikipedia.org. Date and historical account.
03 / 12
11th century
Chengdu, China
Merchants wrote paper promissory notes instead of hauling heavy iron coins. The government took over issuing them in the 1020s.
Source: en.wikipedia.org. Date and historical account.
04 / 12
1497
Spain and its empire
A reform introduced the eight real silver coin, the piece of eight. Minted for centuries, it travelled the world as a trusted trade coin.
Source: en.wikipedia.org. Date and historical account.
05 / 12
1694
London
The Bank of England opened for business on 1 August 1694. Its notes turned deposits into paper that could move from hand to hand.
Source: bankofengland.co.uk. Date and historical account.
06 / 12
1900
United States
The Gold Standard Act fixed one dollar at 25.8 grains of 90% pure gold. Paper money was tied by law to a metal anchor.
Source: en.wikipedia.org. Date and historical account.
07 / 12
1944
Bretton Woods, New Hampshire
Countries agreed to keep their currencies fixed but adjustable, within a 1 percent band, to the dollar, and the dollar was tied to gold.
Source: federalreservehistory.org. Date and historical account.
08 / 12
1950
New York
Diners Club was founded in 1950 as the first independent payment card company. Paying later, through a company in the middle, became ordinary.
Source: en.wikipedia.org. Date and historical account.
09 / 12
August 15, 1971
Washington, DC
President Nixon announced a new economic policy that closed the gold window. Foreign governments could no longer swap dollars for gold.
Source: federalreservehistory.org. Date and historical account.
10 / 12
2007
Kenya
M-Pesa let people deposit, hold and send money from a basic mobile phone.
Source: en.wikipedia.org. Date and historical account.
11 / 12
January 3, 2009
The internet
The bitcoin network was created when its pseudonymous founder mined the starting block. Money could now be defined by open software.
Source: en.wikipedia.org. Date and historical account.
12 / 12
2012
Toronto
AlexNet won the ImageNet contest after training for five to six days on two consumer graphics cards. Learning from examples, at scale, became practical.
Source: en.wikipedia.org. Date and historical account.
Money changes. So does its purchasing power.
2.91¢
The purchasing power left in a dollar between January 1913 and September 2026. Prices rose 34.38 times: $1 in September 2026 buys what about 2.91 cents bought in January 1913.
Source: FRED CPIAUCNS. January 1913 and September 2026 monthly values; fetched October 31, 2026.
CPI measures the price of a typical basket of consumer goods and services. The default logarithmic scale gives equal percentage changes equal height.
Follow the scale
Money stock, not wealth.
M2 includes cash, checking deposits and other readily available deposits. It measures a stock of money, not the total value of everything people own.
At full scale, follow the bar down the page. The small reference mark shows the January 1959 stock; the full bar shows September 2026.
September 2026
$23.41 trillion
2,341 pixels at full scale.
Source: FRED M2SL, monthly seasonally adjusted values, fetched October 31, 2026.