The peculiarity of this form of the cost is that the role of the common equivalent of one good didn’t fix yet.

The fourth stage is the money form of value. The role of the common equivalent played gold (this stage was the most longstanding).

Further the search of the most convenient commodity money began which was accompanied by the refusal of nontransportable, wearing and variegated money. The money arena the ingots of copper, bronze then silver and gold enter. As such metal ingots lost the function of the good itself and became only the exchangeable equivalent it is allowable to argue that in their form the money appear in the sense that we used to understand this word today. Gradually the gold became the basic money stuff and was used for the different denomination coins strikes.

The way of the gold turning into the common equivalent – money was long and difficult. Actually we can suppose that eventually it happened to the middle of the XIX^>th century. Till this moment the money functions along with the gold performed the other precious metals, for example silver. The English monetary unit – pounds sterling – was the weighty pound of silver before.

How can we explain the fact that the gold precisely distinguished from the huge world of goods in the form of specific commodity – money? The gold has the range of unique features:

– homogeneous (the question is about the social value and social labor standard incorporated in the good, i.e. such equivalent should be absolutely homogeneous material);

– chemically inert (it doesn’t rust and remains unchanged almost forever in any environmental conditions);

– portable (there is a plenty large enough cost in relative little volume);

– divisible (any quantity of gold could be easily divided onto the smaller parts).

Strictly speaking theoretically we can distinguish some other materials and metals which also can satisfy the mentioned above conditions: silver, diamonds, platinum, etc.

However the objective process of the economic affairs development distinguished gold precisely. Silver couldn’t compete with gold because of its enough incidence in the earth crust, diamonds are unhomogeneous and couldn’t be divided, platinum found to be scorned by the Spaniards who called it «platina» and simply considered it the waste product of the gold mines.

With the gold usage situation the humanity faced the fact that this metal looses any other distinctive features except quantity. This particular relates this metal with the cost i.e. it looses all the differences between the heterogeneous types of labor. The gold represents itself in the form of «clot» that lacks substance of labor and quantity of socially needed time spent on the concrete good production.

But it should be noted that the gold in itself is not money but the money are gold. Thus we emphasize that the transformation of gold into money is not the natural but objectively social process which takes a lot of time.

With the money form of value appearance the goods receive a specific form of its cost existence in term of price (moreover it is a certain quantity of gold on which the good could be exchanged).

The transition from the subsistence to commercial farming and the exchange equivalence compliance determined the necessity of money appearance without which the mass exchange of goods based on the production specialization and the commodity producers’ material insulation is impossible.

The necessity of money appearance and usage is proved by the numerous and unsuccessful attempts to get away without them. This is borne out by Robert Owen’s idea bankruptcy in 1832 who tried to exchange the goods without money by means of goods evaluation on the basis of work time expenditures with usage of «labor bons». The Russian experience was either unsuccessful when in 1918 and 1921 the attempt of product exchange on the basis of natural coefficients was applied.