---
title: The Story Of Banking
date: 2025-11-03T00:00:00
author: Charlie M.
category: SIGNAL
---
I was standing at the kitchen window this morning, watching the light slowly shift, noticing how it changes the room, when I suddenly remembered that time I found a couple of old coins in an envelope at the back of my desk drawer. I’d completely forgotten about them. They were nothing special, I think. Tokens, maybe? Or some old currency my granddad gave me. And then I got to thinking, how did we get from that—the physical clink of coins—to this vast invisible network of numbers and algorithms we call banking today? It's... really weird when you think about it. Like, what even is money now?
I started scrolling through my phone, kind of hoping to find something that made sense of it all. I read somewhere, or maybe it was a podcast while I was spacing out during a jog, that banking began with simple bartering. So, you know, a chicken for a sack of grain. But eventually, people got tired of lugging chickens around and coins became a thing. Ancient Mesopotamia or something. I’m not great with history. Guess it was just easier to carry a few coins in your pocket than a live chicken.
But coins turned into paper notes at some point. I might've seen that in a Netflix doc? Anyway, I think they started as receipts. So, people left their gold somewhere safe and got a paper saying "I owe you," which sounds like a scam when you think about it. But apparently it worked, and everyone bought into it. Was it trust? Convenience? Or maybe it was just too annoying to carry heavy metal around. I don’t know.
Banking feels like it’s exploded in complexity since then. There's something called fractional reserve banking, which I’m not even going to pretend to fully understand. I think it’s about banks only keeping a fraction of our deposits on hand, lending out the rest. Ugh, sounds risky. But it's... what, the backbone of modern finance? Again, not my forte. I tried watching a YouTube explainer, but it lost me after the first minute.
And credit cards—tiny pieces of plastic that let you buy things with money you don’t technically have. It’s frightening and freeing all at once. I remember being 18 and getting my first credit card, feeling like I could suddenly buy anything. Which I did, mostly impulse buys that seemed necessary at 3 a.m. Honestly, I’ve never fully understood how or why credit works. I just know I have to pay it back, and usually more than I spent. It keeps me up at night sometimes, wondering if I’m in over my head.
Scrolling Instagram, I see ads for these fintech startups popping up all the time now, promising to revolutionize banking. New apps every day that track spending, invest your spare change, streamline savings. They make it sound so easy. But whenever I download one, I end up deleting it soon after. It’s like, do they really help, or just give the illusion of control? Kind of like when I buy all that workout gear and it just collects dust.
And then there's crypto. Bitcoin and whatever else. Digital money, untethered from banks and governments. I don’t know if it’s the future or just another fleeting trend. I mean, I tried to understand mining and blockchains, but it feels like a whole other language. Maybe I’m just getting old, like how my parents were with smartphones.
So, where does that leave us? Coins to credit to crypto. I don't even know if I've grasped a fraction of it. The whole system feels like a house of cards sometimes, but it’s also this amazing thing that powers everything we do. Or maybe I’m just overthinking after too much caffeine?
I’ll probably never fully understand how we got here or where we’re going. But maybe that’s okay. Just like the sunlight shifting across my kitchen, changing everything without any real sense of direction.