 A story is sometimes told of a historical progression from barter to the use of “commodity money” (such as gold, cowrie shells, or beads) to the use of “fiat money” (such as government-issued paper currency) (see Searle 1995, McEachern 2011). Searle argues that all kinds of money are “institutional kinds”, which he analyzes in terms of the collective assignment of a function to a substrate. Commodity money, in his view, involves assignment to a good with some intrinsic value, while fiat money involves assignment to a piece of paper printed by the government.