If money can go from Account A to Account B in 10 seconds, that does not leave much time for erroneous transactions to be cancelled.

A lot is happening with our money right now, from our migration into a cashless world and the roll-out of instant money transfers to the creation of a digital euro and the invention of new currencies in the United States, transforming how we spend.

That is indeed a lot. Can we start at the beginning?

Okay. Physical money originated about 5,000 years ago, when the Mesopotamians began using barley-based shekels for buying and selling. Then the Chinese minted coins some 3,000 years ago, followed by the Greeks and the Romans, who took it further and developed currency systems based around precious metals, including copper, bronze, silver and gold.

Then, about 1,000 years ago, the Chinese were back in the game rolling out bank notes based on promises rather than anything real. Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution when paper money really took off thanks to the English bankers who dispensed pounds, shillings and pence. The Americans joined the party not long after that. Ireland acquired a currency to call its own in the late 1920s when Lady Lavery made her debut on our notes. Then there was the punt and in 1999 the euro arrived, although initially in a virtual sense, and it wasn’t until 2002 that we got the actual notes and coins.

Um, when we said beginning, we actually meant the beginning of the recent changes

Ah, right.