Is currency and money the same thing? No it is not. While money is a value assigned to a good or service etc, currency is simply a physical representation of that value. If the value is fixed, money does not change. Currency however, can.
A good example of this is a farmer selling a cow. To the farmer's mind, the cow is worth $2000 Malaysian ringgit. So the value is set. $2000 ringgit is also worth $53,000 Yen at the time of this writing. Which in turn is also worth $394 Euro. Do you see what happened there? The value of the cow did not change, only the currency representing that value did.
As such, currency can be thought of anything that represents value to be used in exchange for an item, service etc of value. This includes all the currency types in the world. In the old days, currency was any physical representative of a value such as gold, diamonds, livestock etc. Nowadays, a currrency is a printed piece of paper that is backed by the government or governments of a currency zone to represent a value that fluctuates (due to the currency exchange market) over time.
After checking with an authority currency converter site (XE.com), we are left 184 different currencies accross the world which interestingly enough, includes precious metals. In todays day and age the one precious metal that is well accepted is of course, gold. This is probably the one precious metal that can replace the paper currency we use today.
The traditional accepted currency for world trade used to be the US dollar. Ten years ago, the vast majority (Up to 60%) of all international transactions are done via the American dollar. With the emergence of the Euro as a viable alternative, the monopoly USD once held has slowy been eroding.
A study done in 2006 see's the Euro suprassing the American dollar in terms of worlwide circulation. The popularity of the Euro and USD is also seen in the Forex Market. By far the most popular traded pair in forex trading is none other than the Eur/Usd. Other popular currency pairs in forex trading include GBP/JPY, GBP/USD, EUR/JPY, USD/JPY as well has the New Zealand and Australian pairs. But most forex traders still opt for the Euro Usd as a somewhat conservative, stable pair to trade. Exchange Rate list.
