This is wonderfully Darwinian - survival of the fittest. But what would we have done if gold did not exist? Silver, probably. But silver is more common than gold. So maybe we would have developed paper money sooner. Maybe that would have driven us to earlier development of technologies for assessing and disseminating creditworthiness. Maybe we'd have needed a printing press sooner.

One can imagine an entirely different world in which the best monetary metal were as common as silver. Sounds like a job for Frank Herbert....