Paper+Money

Right now in the world the $100 bill is the biggest bill in circultion. THe largest bill ever in circulation is the $10,000 bill shown here.Some of the earliest paper money was used in China where paper money became common around 960 AD onwards. When paper money and coinage became more and more in use money no longer had to be very valuable. A new kind of money got to be very common representative money. This kind of money is in bill form but is not in it own value. It is in the value of either gold or silver such as the old British Pound bill or Pound Sterling was once guaranteed to be redeemable for a pound of sterling silver. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries most money systems were based on representative money through the use of gold standards.

Representative money have now been replaced with fiat money. Fiat money is money that is given a value from the government called a fiat or decree. This made a law that made money legal tender. By law the refusal of "legal tender" money in favor of some other form of payment is illegal.



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