What is Money?

Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, was the first person to define what money is. And what is it? It’s a store of value and a medium of exchange. The paper we use today is a medium of exchange – it got that way because governments made it illegal not to accept it – but it’s not a good store of value. And it’s rapidly and radically becoming less of a store of value.

What we use as money today is actually not money; it’s currency. Technically, that’s simply a word that indicates a government substitute for money.

Doug Casey at the Daily Reckoning.