从历史上来看，有很多不同形式的货币都因为不能完全满足这三种特性的要求而逐步被淘汰，让位给新的符合这些特性要求的货币形式。澳大利亚墨尔本大学商学院的哈珀教授对此作了介绍。他说：

    In the earliest days, for example in ancient Babylon, measures of wheat were the money commodity. People would exchange other goods and services firstly by exchanging quantities of wheat. And eventually it was worked out by the Babylonian priests that they could hold the wheat in a central store and then simply keep records of who owned the wheat. And rather than physically¹ moving the wheat around, eventually we had a primitive² system - quite advanced by the terms of the day - of record keeping. We had ledgers³.

    哈珀教授在谈话中提到这样一些 词汇 ：

    1 money commodity 商品 货币，实物货币

    2 primitive system of record keeping 原始簿记制度

    3 ledger⁴ 分户账

    下面我们分段听一下哈珀教授的这段谈话和中文翻译：（英文略）

    古时候，比如在古巴比伦，小麦被当作实物货币使用。人们在交换其它货物和服务之前先要交换一定数量的小麦。

    后来巴比伦的祭司们发现，他们可以把小麦保存在一个中心仓库中，然后只需要记录下谁拥有这些小麦就可以了。

    这样就用不着把小麦搬来搬去了，于是我们就有了在当时条件下很先进的原始簿记制度，也就是分户账。

    下面我们再完整听一遍哈珀教授的这段谈话。（略）

    接下来，澳洲广播电台金融节目主持人巴里克拉克解释了货币的持久性和可分性问题。他说：

    So even though the problem of portability was solved, a further one was still present, that of durability⁵. Because wheat perishes over time, it's not a good store of value.

    What are good stores of value, of course, are precious metals such as gold and silver. It's not difficult to see why these became a form of money, but in their earliest forms, they were not easily divisible.

    You didn't always have the precise amount, or you couldn't get change. So divisibility is a key property of money.