In the everyday meaning of the word, cash is the physical form of currency: coins and banknotes that can be carried on person and used to pay for goods and services immediately.
However, in different contexts, the meaning of cash can expand to include bank accounts and marketable securities such as government bonds. Even less narrowly, in finance, cash includes all currency equivalents that can be liquidated immediately or near-immediately.
Historically, gold and silver coins were for a long time an almost exclusive means of payment across the globe: the scarcity of precious metals ensured their value and their uniformity allowed for simpler accounting.
The emergence of paper money from seventh century CE onwards has led to the gradual detachment of the value of cash from the value of the material it is made of and the ultimate appearance of fiat currencies — like the U.S. dollar and the euro. These are established as money by the decision of the government and have no intrinsic value.
From the 1980s on, societies across the globe have been increasingly moving away from cash, replacing it with debit and credit cards and, more recently, mobile payments. As of November 2020, the global volume of cash comprises roughly $6.6 trillion — just a fraction of $630 trillion to $1.2 quadrillion, which is the total volume of all types of money.
Related Articles
Cross-Border Trading
“Cross-border trading grants the opportunity to trade in international markets against local counterparties and currencies, which presents unique trading opportunities. Investors engaged in cross-border trading can benefit from access to global ...
Circle
Circle is a fintech firm providing peer-to-peer payment technology. Through its platform, Circle enables consumers and businesses to make payments to one another using their mobile devices. It has been established with the belief that there is a ...
Chain Split
Software forks occur when developers copy the codebase of an already existing project and begin their own independent development based on it. This results in the separation of one or more distinct projects from the original, “parent” project. Chain ...
Delisting
When a project no longer meets the exchange's listing standards, it may get delisted. The reasons behind delisting can be many, some of them are: Lack of regular trading activity; Absence of protocol development; Faulty network or smart ...
Cryptocurrency
The concept of a digital currency secured by cryptography has existed since at least as early as 1983 when American cryptographer David Chaum introduced ecash. However, the first cryptocurrency to truly achieve mainstream recognition was Bitcoin ...