What did they use for really small transactions? Or did they not have as many small transactions? Did they just “add more stuff to the basket”?
Did they use really small pieces of copper or silver?
Yes.
In colonial times they used to slice the Spanish silver dollar into 8 bits?
They did.
Today electronic reciepts for gold in storehouses would make more sense to use.
the above link says silver is $18.75 per ounce…i dibntknow its that true or not.
if it is that would be about $0.60 per gram. which i guess for today is a pretty small transaction.
what type of transaction were you thinking?? is there anythign that is a penny or less now now anyway?? some gum?? that could be sold in bags of 60 or another base metal/commodity used for individual purchase i suppose..or bundling gum with a bouncy ball in vendign machines.
whether it would be more market wise to use copper or smaller digital fractions of silver or gold i dont know.
ebay shows some 1gram silver ingots.
you may jst have more merchant credit accoutns where alrge sum would be deposited with a merchant and you just buy from that account.
First U.S. Mint Issues:
1792 Silver Center Cent - Copper with a tiny dot of silver.
Half Cents - 1793 to 1857: Copper, 5 1/2 pennyweights pure, 5.74 grams. Diameter 22 mm. Original issue edge engraved “TWO HUNDRED FOR A DOLLAR”* Weight was dropped to 5.44 grams in 1800.
The “large cent” contained exactly twice as much copper as the half cent, 100 for a dollar.
There were silver three cent pieces, and silver “half dimes”.
No need to add stuff to a basket, never heard of that being necessary.
*The “dollar” was a unit of measure, authorized by an act of Congress on April 2, 1792, specified as 371 4/16 grains of pure silver, decreased slightly on February 12, 1873 until discontinued in 1935.
As no one has mentioned it yet, George Selgin’s Good Money is about exactly this issue. Assuming you’re looking for a quick and cheap answer, the book’s description and the linked interview should give you a suitable idea as to how private coin makers satisfied the rising demand for small change during the Industrial Revolution.
You can use digital or checking methods. Another common solution, which Selgin brings up, is to mint coins which were redeemable in a certain amount of gold. At the same time the coins would be made of a precious metal, such as silver or an alloy, which gave the metal itself a value and demonstrated a willingness to actually redeem the coin.
“I have been wondering what would be the preferred tertiary money metal on the free market. I think the nominees would be copper, brass (copper and zinc), bronze (copper and tin), nickel, and zinc.”
I have this impression that the price of copper fluctuates far too much to make it into useful money. perhaps plastic coins being redeemable on demand (after being accumulated, of course) in silver could do the trick.
@Merlin, sort of like a bank issued casino chip?
Gold is highly divisible, the Golden Dome at Notre Dame took less than half an ounce of gold.
If one can make them both practical to use and hard to falsify (not impossible, since it would hardly pay to falsify the equivalent of pennies) I don’t see why not.
Gold is highly divisible, the Golden Dome at Notre Dame took less than half an ounce of gold.
But small amounts of gold are not very durable, nor convenient to manage. I could literally chew up and eat one of those fingernail sized coins.
I don’t thing you could digest it very well.
IMHO, money you can squirrel away in your stomach if bad guys are in town isn’t the worst thing ever.
Well, I’m a gold person, but I think there are credible reasons to doubt that enough non-jewelry gold exists to make reasonably sized coins for several billion people. You are going to have a lot of non-commodity (or cheaper commodity) tokens that exchange for gold in accounts.
let us not forget,
jewelry gold is just non-jewelry gold waiting to happen, if the price is right
Even then, the growth of stocks of gold has been far, far below the growth of population. In the 18th and 19th centuries gold was currency for some millions of people in Europe and the Near East; there is no way there is enough to make reasonably sized coins for billions of people.
How many coins per person or gold ounces per person would you think might be reasonable?