>>15095234
>rare enough to hold value
>humans like shiny shit
>malleable
>easily melted and atomized
>commonly found pure
It's hard to make coins out of precious gems. Aluminum is 'shiny' (sort of) but it's not found pure and required the invention of electricity to extract. Humans started off by making gold and silver objects of devotion and status because they're pretty, and the qualities that made those materials useful in that regard also lend themselves to currency

If you're really interested in this subject you should look into what different cultures used as currency before we all started getting too connected and you'll get a sense of why gold/silver/copper/bronze had appeal. Inland Native Americans used sea shells (wampum) because they also had some of these qualities (rare, pretty, commonly found pure, also frequently found in certain natural denominations and could be made into beads) and some African cultures used salt (not pretty but at least useful/essential to life), ivory too

Also I would look into why certain things weren't used based on the area. Sweden for instance has a shitload of copper, which we initially used as coinage, but the abundance meant somewhat larger transactions would require a cartload of the stuff, so Sweden was an early adopter of paper currency to get around the weight issue

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Why Did Gold & Silver Dominate The World As Currency?