Money has probably been the most revolutionary invention of mankind. Even though it has been a gradual process of people requiring something more modular and easier to carry than the previous thing to trade, people shifted from actual goods like livestock and crops to gold and silver to different coins of different materials to paper money. Each was an increase of trust in the previous but as money and by extension paper money became more accessible and accounting and finance became a thing, money wasn't just a commodity to trade, it became a weapon.
Tradable items such as coins of previous centuries and livestock and crops, were simply access to trade. You get something and you give these coins in exchange. But since people started keeping tabs of people's wealth on a piece of paper, they realized adding and subtracting from here and there can still be counted as transaction and people don't have to have the money on them because a centralized trustable system has put a number on his head and declared that this is how much he has and any more than that is illegal. From this people got the idea of lending because money is now mainly paper and merely a number on a registry book, people could move money very easily. Since they can move it easily. They can always take a little more than what they had and do something more and maybe give them back to whoever gave it to them in the first place. Very simple huh? That was the idea until usury came along. If I'm not wrong, usury is banned in many religions including Islam which I follow. And I deem it to be correct because I have never seen interests being of any good for anyone other than simply destroying a lot of people who are stomped under the growing interest. What could have been a simple return of the borrowed money, gets extended and delayed because you have to pay the interest first. And basically the lender owns you because you have no other way out. Yes, you still have to pay the initial amount in a system where interests don't exist, but in that case you stand a better chance of paying it.
I know most of you know most of the things, which I just said, but recently I lost a documentary of how the Ottoman empire collapsed under the burden of debt and the interest of that debt. So I thought I should talk about it at least a little bit.
