[fzzt]

The history of coinage spans thousands of years. Despite the popular tales, spot barter was almost certainly not the basis of any real economies.

There is definitely some bias in the availability of data, but it was comparatively harder to end up in a hyperinflationary spiral in the era of commodity or representative currencies, and these were commonplace until the twentieth century.

There were instances of money suddenly losing all value due to the failure of the issuing state (e.g., confederate dollar banknotes), but that's probably a different story.