Editing Medium of exchange (section)

== Requisites needed ==
Although the [[unit of account]] must be in some way related to the medium of exchange in use, e.g. ensuring [[currency|coinage]] is in denominations of that unit, making [[accounting]] simpler to perform, it is more often the case that media of exchange have no natural relationship to that unit, and must be 'minted' as having that value. Further, there may be variances in quality of the underlying good which may not have fully agreed [[value (marketing)|perceived value]] grading. The difference between the two functions becomes obvious when one considers the fact that coins were very often 'shaved.' Precious metal was removed from them, leaving them still useful as an identifiable coin in the marketplace, for a certain number of units in trade, but which no longer had the quantity of metal supplied by the coin's minter. It was observed as early as [[Oresme]], [[Copernicus]] and then in 1558 by Sir [[Thomas Gresham]], that "bad" money drives out "good" in any marketplace; ([[Gresham's law]] states "Where legal tender laws exist, bad money drives out good money"). A more precise definition follows that: "A currency that is artificially overvalued by law will drive out of circulation a currency that is artificially undervalued by that law." Gresham's law is a specific application of the general law of price controls. A common explanation is that people will always keep the less adultered, less clipped, less filed, less trimmed coin, and offer the other in the marketplace for the full units for which it is marked. It is inevitably the bad coins proffered, good ones retained.

[[Bank]]s as financial intermediaries between ultimate savers and borrowers,<ref>{{Cite book|last=Llewellyn, David T.|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/48877769|title=The new economics of banking|date=1999|publisher=Société universitaire européenne de recherches financières|isbn=90-5143-028-0|location=Amsterdam|oclc=48877769}}</ref> and their ability to generate a medium of exchange marked higher than a fiat currency's store of value, is the basis of [[banking]]. [[Central banking]] is based on the principle that no medium requires more than the guarantee of the state that it can be redeemed for payment of [[debt]] as "[[legal tender]]" – so all money equally backed by the state is considered good money, within that state.{{Dubious|date=March 2010}} So long as that state produces anything of [[economic value|value]] to others, the medium of exchange has some value, and the currency may also be useful as a [[standard of deferred payment]] among others.

Of all functions of money, the medium of exchange function has historically been the most problematic due to [[counterfeiting]], the systematic and deliberate creation of bad money with no authorization to do so, leading to the driving out of the good money entirely.

Other functions rely not on recognition of some token or weight of metal in a marketplace, where time to detect any counterfeit is limited and benefits for successful passing-off are high, but on more stable long term [[social contract]]s: one cannot easily force a whole society to accept a different standard of deferred payment, require even small groups of people to uphold a [[floor price]] for a store of value, still less to re-price everything and rewrite all accounts to a unit of account (the most stable function). Thus it tends to be the medium of exchange function that constrains what can be used as a form of [[financial capital]].

It was once common in the [[United States]] to widely accept a check ({{langx|en-GB|[[cheque]]}}) as a medium of exchange, several parties endorsing it perhaps multiple times before it would eventually be deposited for its value in units of account, and thus redeemed. This practice became less common as it was exploited by forgers and led to a [[domino effect]] of bounced checks – a forerunner of the kind of fragility that electronic systems would eventually bring.

In the age of [[electronic money]] it was, and remains, common to use very long strings of difficult-to-reproduce numbers, generated by [[encryption]] methods, to authenticate transactions and commitments as having come from trusted parties. Thus the medium of exchange function has become wholly a part of the marketplace and its signals, and is utterly integrated with the unit of account function, so that, given the integrity of the [[public key]] system on which these are based, they become to that degree inseparable. This has clear advantages – counterfeiting is difficult or impossible unless the whole system is compromised, say by a new [[Integer factorization|factoring algorithm]]. But at that point, the entire system is broken and the whole infrastructure is obsolete – new keys must be re-generated and the new system will also depend on some assumptions about difficulty of factoring.

Due to this inherent fragility, which is even more profound with [[electronic voting]], some [[list of economists|economists]] argue that units of account should not ever be abstracted or confused with the nominal units or tokens used in exchange. A medium is simply a medium, and should not be confused for the message.{{Dubious|date=December 2008}}