One of the most important innovations in finance was also one of the most important innovations in gaming - the coin. Coins first appear in the archaeological record in Lydia around 600s BC. While imperfect and asymmetrical by modern standards, hand-struck coins offered significant standardization of size, weight, denomination, and expected purity over ingots or scrap. For gaming, they introduced an imperfect-but-better version of a random number generator for 1 and 2. That is to say, you could flip a coin to approximate a 50/50 chance. Even a modern fair coin will still be something like 50.8% to 49.2% in favor of whichever side is facing up, and early coins were considerably more irregular in design and how an individual coin was struck. However, flips were still individually unpredictable enough that they became the standard for 50/50 odds by at least the 200s BC in the Roman Republic. We would say “heads or tails” and the Romans would say “heads or ships” to settle such a bet or decision. This is an important improvement in random number generation, including for early games, which give us early examples of what the coin flip replaced. In the ancient Egyptian game of Senet, the standard was to have flat sticks with a light and dark side, which functioned as two-sided dice (i.e. a coin for flipping). Queen Nefertiti is depicted playing the game in her tomb around 1333 BC. Going even further back to ancient Sumeria, the Game of Twenty Squares (sometimes called the Royal Game of Ur) from around 2500 BC uses tetrahedrons, but with two of the four tips marked for 1 and two unmarked for 0. Tetrahedron dice may be more familiar to DnD players as four-sided dice. Other attested methods around the world include flat rocks or shells. But pretty much everywhere coinage spread, it became the standard for an RNG across the set of 1-and-2, both because coins improved in regularity as a way to combat counterfeiting and because they became more common to have on hand (especially in a gambling context) as dice that were created by a disinterested third party. Actual dice supplied by one player or gambler could always be weighted, particularly if the stakes were high or you had never used them before. This may account for why animal knuckle bones - definitely not fair dice - stood in as dice for thousands of years. They were imperfect but no one was specifically trying to visibly disguise those imperfections, and they were manufactured by an impartial third party (usually a sheep or cow or pig). We take for granted that odds can be relied upon. The invention of the coin not only revolutionized commerce and finance, but also contributed significantly to gaming.