What is barter trading? Quotes defining barter from the book “Money is Biological”

This is an excerpt from my book “Money is Biological: Exploring Money’s Emergence, Evolution, Innovation, and Future.” It’s available on Amazon.

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1. Barter becomes emergent and natural when cooperation extends across tribes and nations.

2. Fundamentally, barter is the starting point of money and incorporates other inventions we’ve mentioned, such as clay tablets, paper for cash or gold certificates, metals for coins, blockchain for cryptocurrency, and Hindu-Arabic numerals, etc.

3. Thus, barter is inherent in credit money and all later forms of money (commodity, fiat, and crypto).

4. Instead of stating it was a transition from barter money to commodity money, I infer that it was the evolution and stacking of commodity money into barter. All forms of money that emerged along our evolutionary path, such as fiat and cryptocurrency, stack into barter. Barter took on a different manifestation.

5. Money, in its evolutions and representations — commodity money, fiat, and credit (to be explained in the following chapter) — is barter. Different methods and inventions of representing barter are added, stacked, or infused to make it more agile.

6. I infer that mere cooperation between tribes or animals is a semblance of a credit system. It is bartering (the overarching term) that will be paid in the future through cooperation. Animals protect their packs all the time (give out credit), and the others reciprocate when necessary (pay back the debt): elephants, orangutans, orcas, lions, wolves, polar bears, emperor penguins, dolphins, chimpanzees, bees, birds, mice, kangaroos, hyenas, and cheetahs. Baby animals learn this and reciprocate when they are older. It’s how they repay the debt (credit) to their tribe.

7. The need for bartering came first and naturally in animal cooperation and reciprocation. By bartering cooperation, they established a not-so-explicit credit system.