Over on the discussion board, Oliver and Antti suggest that I read two essays from Alfred Mitchell-Innes. Here are a few thoughts. 

A British diplomat, Mitchell-Innes was appointed financial advisor to King Chulalongkorn of Siam in the 1890s as well as serving in Cairo. He eventually ended up in the British Embassy in Washington where he penned his two essays on money. The first, What is Money, attracted the attention of John Maynard Keynes, while the second essay, The Credit Theory of Money—which was written in 1914—expounded on his views.

Both are interesting essays and worth your time. One of Mitchell-Innes's main points is that all money is credit. This may have been a controversial stance back in 1914, when people were still very much focused on metallic money, but I don't think anyone would find it terribly controversial today. If we look at the instruments that currently function as money, all of them are forms of credit, that is, they are obligations or "credits on a banker" as Mitchell-Innes puts it.

Having established his credit theory at the outset of his 1914 essay, Mitchell-Innes devotes much ink to patching up its weakest point: coins. Any critic will be quick to point out that the historical circulation of coins contradicts his claim that all money is credit. Coins, especially gold ones, were valued as commodities, not credit.

To protect his credit theory from this criticism, Mitchell-Innes downplays the role played by coins. So in What is Money he claims that for large chunks of history, the "principal instrument of commerce" wasn't the coin, but the medieval tally stick. These ingenious objects look like this:

Medieval tally sticks, an early example of public/private key technology https://t.co/DG1p5Sn399 pic.twitter.com/cOAz2PoiRZ

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) November 8, 2016

While I certainly like the idea of tally sticks, to claim that they were the main way of engaging in hand-to-hand trade during medieval times doesn't seem likely. Long and awkwardly shaped, tally stick are not nearly as convenient as coins. It's hard to see why anyone would prefer them. Just like the sleek US$1 bill has driven the bulky $1 coin out of circulation, one would expect coins to push bulky tally sticks out of general usage.

Alfred Mitchell-Innes once claimed that tally sticks—not coins—were the dominant medieval instrument of commerce: https://t.co/o4qimrRdGT

Seems unlikely, no? Why lug a bundle of heavy 8-inch long sticks in your pocket for making payments when coins took up much less space? pic.twitter.com/aIRW9Eghr3

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) October 30, 2018

Mitchell-Innes's second, and more radical, line of defence is to claim that coins themselves are a form of credit. "A government coin is a "promise to pay," just like a private bill or note," he says. Elsewhere he writes: "A coin is an instrument of credit or token of indebtedness identical in its nature with a tally or with any other form of money, by whomsoever issued."

This is a strange idea. Why would anyone issue a financial promise encoded on gold? For instance, imagine that I owe you some money. To give physical form to my debt, you ask me to write out an IOU which you will keep in your pocket. But why would I inscribe my promise on something expensive like a gold disc, especially when I could simply record it on a cheap and lightweight piece of paper? Larry White puts it better here:

"This account fails to explain, however, why governments chose bits of gold or silver as the material for these tokens, rather than something cheaper, say bits of iron or copper or paper impressed with sovereign emblems. In the market-evolutionary account, preciousness is advantageous in a medium of exchange by lowering the costs of transporting any given value. In a Cartalist pay-token account, preciousness is disadvantageous — it raises the costs of the fiscal operation — and therefore baffling. Issuing tokens made of something cheaper would accomplish the same end at lower cost to the sovereign."

Mitchell-Innes doesn't make much of an effort to explain why gold might have been selected as a medium for inscribing IOUs. But on the discussion board, Antti has a provocative theory. Credit is often collateralized, an asset being pledged by a borrower to a lender in order to reduce the risk of the loan. If a gold coin is a form of credit, then maybe the gold embodied in the coin is serving as collateral.

Think about it this way. While it would certainly be cheaper for me to record my IOU on paper, if I welch on my promise then the person who holds my IOU is left with nothing but a worthless note. But if I welch on an IOU that is encoded on a gold disc, at least the person who has my IOU is left with some gold (albeit of lower worth than the face value of the original IOU).

According to Antti's theory, a gold coin is therefore a more solid form of credit than a note, since it provides recourse in the form of precious metals collateral. If my credit is bad, the only way I may be able to get a loan is to issue gold IOUs, my paper ones being too risky for people to accept.

It's an interesting theory, but the problem with inscribing my IOUs on gold is that it is a terribly insecure way for me to conduct my business. Gold is highly malleable. Bite a gold coin between your canines and you'll leave a mark on its surface (trust me, I've done it). So if I pay you with my coin IOU, you could clip a tiny bit off the edge and keep it for yourself, passing the rest of the coin off at a store. That store owner could in turn pay it away to a supplier. Unaware that it has been clipped, the supplier returns the coin to me for redemption. I am obligated to accept the clipped coin at full value since it is my IOU. However, I've had a chunk of my collateral stolen somewhere along the transactions chain—and there's nothing I can do about it.

So putting one's gold collateral into circulation is an open invitation for thieves, which is why Antti's collateral theory of coins doesn't seem very realistic to me.


The idea that coins circulated at more than their precious metals content, or intrinsic value, can be found throughout Mitchell-Innes's two essays. He uses the existence of this premium as proof that the metal content of a coin is not relevant to its value, its credit value being the sole remaining explanation.

To some extent, I agree with Mitchell-Innes. Over the course of history coins have often circulated above their intrinsic value, and from time-to-time this premium has been due to their value as credit. The merchants' counterstamps below are great examples. By adding a stamp to a government coin, these merchants have elevated the coin's value from one cent to five or ten cents.

Redenominated coins are IOUs printed on metal.

"The practice of elevating the denomination of circulating cents seems to have been an early Civil War era phenomenon, given the shortage of then circulating coins." Source: https://t.co/OIMMt2CBVj pic.twitter.com/UiXSBKpk7u

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) October 29, 2018

These three coins are straight out of Mitchell-Innes two essays. As I say in the tweet, counterstamped coins effectively functioned as an IOU of the merchant. For instance, take the five cent Cameron House token, on the right. This token was issued by a Pennsylvania-based hotel—Cameron House.  Its intrinsic value was one cent, but Cameron House's owner promised to take the coin back at five cents, presumably in payment for a room. The sole driver of the coin's value was the reliability of Cameron House's promise, the amount of metal in the token having no bearing whatsoever on its purchasing power.

While Cameron House's stamp turned metal into a much more valuable form of credit, not all stamps do this. Last week I wrote about coin regulators who regulated gold coins and shroffs who chopped coins. Both functioned as assayers, weighing a coin and determining its fineness. If the coin was up to standard, the regulator or shroff stamped their brand onto its face and pushed it back into circulation. Below is a chopmarked U.S. trade dollar:

Chopped 1880 U.S. trade dollar (source)

But unlike the Cameron House stamp, the regulation or chopping of coins didn't turn them into a credit of the regulator or shroff. The marks were simply indicators that the coin had been audited and had passed the test, and nothing more.

Both the Cameron House coin and the chopped U.S. trade dollar would have traded at a premium to the intrinsic value of the metal that each contained. But for different reasons. As I wrote above, the Cameron House coin was a form of credit, like a paper IOU, and thus its value derived from Cameron House's credit quality, not the material in the token. But not so the chopped U.S. trade dollar. Precious metals are always more useful in assayed form than as raw bullion. While it is simple to test the weight of a quantity of precious metals, it is much harder to verify its fineness. This is why chopmarks would have been helpful. Anyone coming into possession of the chopmarked coin could be sure that its fineness had been validated by an expert shroff. And thus it was more trustworthy than silver that had no chopmark. People would have been willing to pay a bit extra, a premium, for this guarantee.

Remember that a decline in the amount of metal in a five-cent Cameron House token would not have changed its purchasing power. With a chopmarked trade dollar, however, any reduction in its metal content flowed through directly to its exchange value. This is because a chopmarked dollar was nothing more than verified raw silver. And just as the value of raw gold or silver is determined by how many grams are being exchanged, the same goes for a chopmarked trade dollar.

And so whereas Mitchell-Innes has a single theory of money, we've arrived at two reasons for why coins might trade at a premium to intrinsic value, and why their purchasing power might change over time. The Cameron House theory, which also happens to be Mitchell-Innes's theory, and the chopmarked trade dollar theory, which is completely contrary to Mitchell-Innes's essays.


I've used private coinage for my examples, but these principles apply just as well to government coinage. Our modern government-issued coins are very similar to the Cameron House tokens. They are a type of IOU (as I wrote here). In the same way that trimming away 10% from the edge of a $5 note won't reduce that note's purchasing power one bit, clipping some of the metal off of a toonie (a $2 Canadian coin) won't alter its market value. The metal content of a modern coin is (almost always) irrelevant.

But whereas modern government coins operate on Cameron House principals, medieval government coins operated on the same principals as chopmarked traded dollars. In England, a merchant who wanted coins would bring raw gold or silver to a mint to be converted into coin. But the merchant had to pay the mint master a fee. The amount by which a coin's market value exceeded its intrinsic value depended on the size of the mint's fee.

Say it was possible for a merchant to purchase a certain amount of raw gold with gold coins, pay the fee to have the raw gold minted into coins, and end up with more coins than he started with. This would be a risk-free way to make money. Everyone would replicate this transaction—buying raw gold with coins and converting it back into coins—until the gap between the market price of a coin and the market price of an equivalent amount of gold had narrowed to the size of the fee. 

Premia on coins weren't always directly related to mintage fees. English mints usually operated on the principle of free coinage—anyone could bring their gold or silver to the mint to be turned into coin. But sometimes the mint would close to new business. Due to their usefulness and growing scarcity, gold coins would circulate at an ever larger premium to an equivalent amount of raw gold. Since merchants could no longer bring raw gold to the mint and thereby increase the supply of coins, there was no mechanism for reducing this premium.

So as you can see, whether the mint was open and coinage free, or whether it was closed, the premium had nothing to do with the coin's status as a form of credit. It was due to a combination of the superiority of gold in validated form and the availability of validated supply.

In sum, Mitchell-Innes is certainly right that coins have often been a form of credit. A stamp on a piece of metal often elevates it from being a mere commodity to a token of indebtedness. In which case we get Cameron House money. But as often as not, that stamp is little more than an assay mark, a guarantee of fineness. In which case we have chopmarked trade dollars. Both sorts of stamps put a premium on the coin, but for different reasons.

Coming up with grand theories of money is tempting, as Mitchell-Innes has done, but unfortunately these theories sometimes obscure the finer features of monetary instruments. At times, having twenty or thirty bespoke theories may be a better way to understand monetary phenomena than one grand one.

While our modern monetary system certainly has plenty of detractors, one of its successes is that we no longer need the services of the local gold regulator. In the late 1700s, the job of a gold regulator was to assay gold coins to determine if they were of the appropriate weight and fineness, modifying (ie 'regulating') the coin if necessary. When he was done, the gold regulator stamped the coin with his seal of approval and put it back into circulation.

The job of regulating coins may seem strange to us. But it was an ingenious way to cope with the lack of standardization that bedeviled monetary systems in the 1600 and 1700s, particularly in the colonies. There was no domestic supply of coins in North America back then, so settlers relied on a bewildering array of foreign coins as their media of exchange, each with its own weight and fineness, and most of poor quality. This included not only silver coins such as Spanish dollars, pistareens, and English crowns, but also a gamut of gold coins including Portuguese joes and moidores, English guineas, French Louis d'ors and pistoles, German carolines, and Spanish doubloons.

Each of these foreign gold coins was minted with a unique quantity of the yellow metal. For instance, the popular Portuguese half Johannes, or "half Joe", weighed 221 grains and was 91.7% pure when it left the mint, whereas a full-bodied Spanish doubloon weighed 416 grains (one gram equals ~15 grains). Thanks to constant wear and illegal clipping, these coins would inevitably lose some of their mass as they circulated. For merchants, the task of weighing each gold coin that was presented to them, checking if it was a counterfeit, and calculating its appropriate monetary value would have been fatiguing.

To help merchants determine the rate at which to accept a particular gold coin, the authorities published tables with coin weights and values. These coin standards were issued by various legislative bodies or by the merchants themselves. For instance, here is a table produced by the New York Chamber of Commerce in 1770:


Let's go through an example of how an American merchant might use this table. Say a customer offers a merchant a slightly worn half-Joe. The merchant measures the coin and discovers that it weighs exactly 9 dwt, or 216 grains. A dwt is a pennyweight, an archaic unit for measuring weights that derives from denarius weight. (1 dwt = 24 grains = 1.55 grams). Let's further assume say this exchange occurred in New York.

According to the above table, any half-Joe passed in New York that weighs at least 9 dwt 0 grains is legal tender for £3 and 4 shillings. Look in the columns titled "least weight" and "N. York". So if our merchant happens to be selling horses for £3 4s, then he'd be happy to accept the customer's slightly worn half-Joe as sufficient payment for a horse. But if the half-joe were to weigh less than 216 grains (or 9 dwt), then it would fail to meet the Chamber of Commerce's standards, and therefore the merchant wouldn't accept it—the coin is worth less than the horse's sticker price of £3 and 4 shillings.

Testing a coin's weight is easy, but it is unlikely that many merchants would have had the time or expertise to verify its purity. Whereas a Portuguese half-joe was minted with 91.7% fine, a good counterfeit half-joe might be just 88% pure. If a subsequent trading partner questioned a counterfeit's validity, a merchant who had accidentally accepted it could be out of pocket. To remove any doubt, a suspect coin could be brought to the local regulator to be assayed. After removing a small section of the coin, the regulator would then test the coin's gold content. If it was a good coin, he would plug up the test section and stamp his initials on it. Having been approved by a recognized member of the community, the coin could easily pass in trade.

This watchdog function reminds me of the part played by Chinese shroffs, or money changers, in the Chinese monetary system of the 17th-19th centuries. Like North America, China was inundated with a whole range of foreign coins. Local shroffs would assay a foreign coin to verify its silver content. If the coin passed their purity test, a shroff would stamp it with his own peculiar chopmark, usually a Chinese character or symbol. Over time, foreign coins circulating in China might collect multiple chops. The genius of this system is that a naive Chinese consumer could safely accept a strange coin knowing that it had successfully passed the smell test of professional appraisers—and the more chops the better.

Chopmarked 1807 Spanish silver dollar

If you are interested in the Chinese practice of chopmarking, I wrote about it here and here.

Testing for fineness is just one theory for the role played by North American gold regulators. There is a second theory. Not only were they watchdogs, but regulators also acted as enhancers or correctors. To see why this might be true, let's delve a bit more into the dynamics in play in North America in the 1700s.   

If you look at the original table above, notice that the New York Chamber of Commerce listed the minimum accepted weight of the half-Joe as 216 grains. However, as I pointed out earlier, a freshly-minted half-Joe actually weighed 221 grains. So the Chamber of Commerce's standard tolerated the circulation of underweight half-Joes. (They did the same with other coins too, including the doubloon, which when freshly minted weighed 418 grains but was accepted by the Chamber of Commerce at 408 grains.) Providing some extra leeway was probably a wise move. The coins used by New Yorkers came from distant realms and inevitably suffered from wear & tear.

But if a half-joe had lost too much of it original heft it would fail to meet the Chamber's standard. This is where a gold regulator might come in handy. Say that a half-Joe was brought to a bank but found to only weigh 207 grains, well below both the Chamber's standard of 216 grains and its original mint weight of 221 grains. The bank would purchase it at discount, say by crediting the customer with just £3 1 shilling instead of the Chamber's standard £3 4s, then send the underweight coin to a gold regulator. The regulator would proceed to cut out a section of the coin and insert a purer (and heavier) gold plug into the hole, bringing its weight back up to the 216 grain standard.

The regulator would then stamp his initials on his modification, upon which the bank would pay the regulated coin out as change. The regulator's marks were proof that the coin lived up to the Chamber's weight standard, and presumably made it easier to pass from hand to hand. Here is what a coin that has been regulated with a plug looks like:

In the 1700s, only foreign gold coins circulated in the US. The job of a "regulator" was to weigh each one. If it was underweight relative to the standard, they added a plug and initialed it (like the one below, countermarked by John Bayley). If it was overweight, the shaved it. pic.twitter.com/JfRXKq20DP

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) May 14, 2018

The coin in my tweet is a regulated 1747 Portuguese half-Joe. Notice that the plug is slightly raised on the face side of the coin, or the obverse side. On the reverse side of the coin, the plug is rounded and convex. So it apparent to the eye how the plug might add some heft to an underweight coin.

A coin could also be modified in a way that reduced it to the Chamber's standard. If a fresh half-Joe arrived in New York weighing 221 grains, it made no sense for its owner to spend it as-is. Given the Chamber's standards, a 216 grain half-Joe was sufficient to buy £3 and 4 shillings of goods and services (or settle £3 and 4 shillings debts). A 221 grain half-Joe was overkill. A customer could deposit their full-weighted half-joe at the bank for more then its value (say £3 and 5 shillings). The bank's gold regulator would then shave it down to size and stamp his initials on it. Thus the modified half-joe could circulate legally despite having a small amount clipped from it. It would have looked a bit like this:

Regulated 1774 Portuguese half-joe. Source

Note the flat part at the bottom where the half-Joe has been clipped by a regulator.

So a gold regulator's role, whether it be as a watchdog or an enhancer, or a bit of both, was to bring some much-needed order to the chaos of a multicoin monetary system. By bringing a gold coin up to standard, or reducing it to standard, they would have helped ensure the fungibility of North America's coinage. And by stamping their initials on it, regulators provided a guarantee of purity to the public—removing some of the uncertainty involved in accepting unfamiliar coins.

By the 1800s, there was no longer a need to have a gold regulators. Most of the deficiencies of the old non-standardized monetary system had been fixed. Paper money had largely displaced gold coins, so merchants had fewer occasions where they had to worry about accepting bad coins. As for smaller denomination silver coins, these were eventually replaced by token coins. The issuer's promise to buy them back at a fixed price, and not their metal content, dictates a token's value. While their time may be past, gold regulators remain a testament to monetary ingenuity.

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Selected sources:
1. Sedwick, Daniel: The Regulated Gold Coinage of North America and the West Indies in the Late 1700s [link]
2. Michener, Ron: Money in the American Colonies [link]
3. Neufeld, EP: Money and Banking in Canada
4. The Yale University Brasher Doubloon [link]
5. Introductory Note: Report on the Establishment of a Mint, [28 January 1791] [link]
6. Mossman, Phillip: Money of the American Colonies and Confederation [link]

"The head of a fool on the neck of an ass."

That's how Londoners described the strange silver coin pictured above, which first appeared in Britain in 1797. Due to worries that Napoleon was about to invade the British Isles, a run had developed on the Bank of England. In response, Parliament allowed the Bank to refuse to redeem its notes with gold coins, but this had only resulted in an inconvenient shortage of coins.

To remedy the shortage, the Bank of England decided to open its vault and put its hoard of silver coins into circulation. Complicating matters was the fact that these coins were not native shillings or pennies, but Spanish dollars, otherwise known as eight real pieces. As such, they had to be re-purposed into local currency. The Bank of England accomplished this task by stamping the head of King George III—the fool—on the neck of Charles IV of Spain—the ass—who occupied the obverse side of that era's version of the Spanish dollar. The Bank then declared that all stamped Spanish dollars were to be worth four shillings and nine pence. People flocked to the Bank of England's window to get their hands on the new coins.  

That the Spanish dollar temporarily became part of England's circulating media of exchange was due to its ubiquity—in its heyday the Spanish dollar, like today's U.S. dollar, was everywhere. After discovering huge amounts of silver in the new world, the Spaniards had set up a mint in Mexico City in 1536 to produce large quantities of silver coins. Mints in Potosi (Bolivia), Lima (Peru), and elsewhere soon followed. It is estimated that some four-fifths of the world's silver produced between 1493 and 1850 came from Spanish America, almost all of it in the form of Spanish dollars! 


Although their design changed over the centuries, by the 1700s the Spanish dollar—easily identified by the two "pillars of Hercules" on the reverse side of the coin—had become known and accepted all over the world. As the map above shows, the two pillars refer to the Rock of Gibraltar in Spain and its counterpart on the Moroccan side of the narrow strait separating Africa from Europe.

In addition to England, the Spanish dollar shows up in the Caribbean islands where it made up a major part of the local coinage. To provide small change, locals cut dollars up into pieces. Below, an 1806 dollar used in Guadeloupe has had its centre carved out of it and stamped with the letter "G". Earmarking of coins was done to prevent exportation and restrict usage within borders. In this way, local currencies were literally piggybacked into existence off of the ubiquitous Spanish dollar.

Source: The Spanish Dollar as Adapted for Currency in Our West Indian Colonies

In the next image, a Trinidadian version of the dollar has been carved up like a pizza. The half piece has been countermarked with a "6", the third with a "4", and the sixth with a "2". These numbers refer to the number of bits or bitts the piece was worth, the bit being a local accounting unit. By marking the letters "TR" on each dollar to indicate Trinidad, the Spanish dollar has been forked to create a second currency.

Spanish dollar marked with TR for Trinidad

All possible methods of cutting up Spanish dollars were used. Here's a 1797 dollar from Saint Lucia that has been cut up lengthwise, like a loaf of bread, with "SLucie" being countermarked on each section.

Saint Lucia Spanish dollar

The Spanish dollar also made a notable appearance on the opposite side of the globe. In 1813, the colony of Australia minted its first currency, the so-called holey dollar. To deal with a shortage of coins, the governor of New South Wales imported thousands of Spanish dollars. A convicted forger was contracted to cut the centre from each one, countermarking each of the resulting pieces with the name of the colony and its nominal value in shillings and pence. As in the case of the Caribbean Islands, this mutilation of the dollar was an attempt to render them useless outside of the colony. The outer ring was rated at five shillings and the centre—the dump—at fifteen pence, or one shilling and three pence. 

Australians solved a coin shortage in 1812 by overstamping Spanish reals—then cutting a second coin from the middle. https://t.co/HcM8FwCtyz pic.twitter.com/JYpzvmcihI

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) August 24, 2017

The Spanish dollar, which would become the Mexican dollar after Mexico won its independence from Spain, was also popular in China. Merchants and professional money exchangers, or shroffs, would test a coin to verify its silver content. According to James Gullberg, they went about this by balancing the coin on their finger and tapping it. If it rang, it was legitimate. The theory goes that once the coin had passed their purity test, a shroff would stamp that coin with his own peculiar chopmark—a Chinese character, an emblem, symbol, or a pseudo character. (I discussed this practice in more depth here). The more chops a Spanish dollar had, the better its quality—even after it had been chopped beyond recognition.

1807 Spanish dollar with chopmarks

Pictured above is a chopped Spanish dollar from 1807. According to Gullberg, Chinese merchants preferred the Carolus IIII dollar, which was issued between 1772-1810. They referred to it as four work, the IIII resembling the Chinese character for going to work. The influence of the Spanish/Mexican dollar continued even into the 19th century: the banknote below, issued in 1912 by the Sino-Belgian Bank, is redeemable in Mexican dollars.

International finance, 1912 edition. A Chinese banknote denominated in Mexican dollars issued by a Belgian bank. pic.twitter.com/wraMOcIepD

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) August 30, 2016

Moving back west, the Spanish/Mexican dollar had a key role to play in the North American economy up to the mid-1800s. In both Canada and the U.S., the unit of account function of money was separated from the medium of exchange function. Early colonists kept prices in pounds, shillings, and pence unit of account, but Spanish dollars and their subdivisions were used to transact business. Because of the long distance from England, there simply weren't enough shillings and pennies to make do.

Even though a local U.S. dollar coin—which was modeled off of the Spanish dollar—had been minted as early as 1794, the Spanish version remained by far the most popular form of coinage in the U.S. The presence of the Spanish dollar was even enshrined in American law, the coins having been declared legal tender in 1793. Many people have even speculated that the famous dollar sign, $, has been bastardized from the symbol for peso.

Source: Evolution of the Dollar Mark (1912)

To illustrate the ubiquity of the Spanish dollar in the U.S., below I've included a 6¼ cent note issued in 1816 by Easton and Wilkesbarre Turnpike Company, which built and operated private toll roads. This odd denomination only makes sense if you consider it in the same context as the Spanish dollar. Unlike U.S. dollars, which were divisible by 100 into cents, the Spanish dollar was divisible into 8 reals. A one-real coin, a fairly common unit around that time, would have been worth 12½ cents, and a ½ real coin worth 6¼ cents. So while the turnpike company's decision to issue a 6¼ cent note might seem odd to us today, it was probably meant as a convenience to its users, who would have been more familiar with Spanish coins than any other type of coin.

A 6¼¢ note (1816). Odd denomination, but logical given that the Spanish half-real was still a popular coin in the US. (8R = $1, so ½R = 6¼¢) pic.twitter.com/7oDAVCTfFc

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) September 18, 2017

As for Canada, below is an 1819 $5 bill from the Bank of Upper Canada. To help customers who couldn't read, the bank conveniently printed an image of five Spanish dollars at the bottom of the note.

This 1819 banknote has five Spanish dollars illustrated along its bottom

For a number of reasons, the Mexican dollar was eventually killed off . The U.S. had originally been on a bimetallic standard, but in 1834 the authorities changed the silver-to-gold ratio to 16:1 from 15:1, in the process slightly overvaluing gold. The discover of the yellow metal in California only further pressured the price of gold down relative to silver, exacerbating the legally-imposed undervaluation of silver. As a result, silver coins began to disappear. After all, anyone who had a stash of silver coins would have found it more profitable to melt them down and export them overseas where they traded at their true economic value. The U.S. had effectively flipped onto a gold standard. To compound matters, Spanish dollars lost legal tender status in 1856, which would have further crimped their demand.

As for Asia, several competing coins were created, including the Japanese yen, a near-replica of the Mexican dollar. The U.S. began to produce special trade dollars that were to be used solely in Asian trade (I wrote about the trade dollar here). Further reducing the demand for Mexican silver was the decision by many nations to follow the major western nations and officially adopt gold standards, including Japan in 1897 and the Philippines in 1904.


Even though it was eventually eclipsed, there are still modern day echoes of the old Spanish dollar. The pejorative term two bit is still used in the U.S. as a synonym for cheap or insignificant, as in two-bit thief. One bit was ⅛ of a dollar, or 12.5¢, and two-bits 25¢, so a two-bit thief is a 25¢ thief. Amazingly, the practice of pricing in sixteenths continued on the New York Stock Exchange up till 2001. The Toronto Stock Exchange decimalized in 1996.


Up here in Canada, Quebecers use the word piasse for dollar. I had always assumed that they meant piece, but I recently discovered that the wording actually goes back centuries to piastre, the French word for the Spanish peso. Even more interesting is the vernacular usage of trente-sous (or 30 sous) to mean 25-cents, which I only understood after reading this from Frédéric Farid.
 

After the '87 market crash, a business man begs for 25¢ (Source)

The story goes like this. In the 18th and 19th Centuries, an English halfpenny was referred to in the colony of Lower Canada (i.e. Quebec) as a sou. The pound-shilling-pence unit of account (£/s/d) was still in use at the time but Spanish dollars were the most common coin in circulation in both Upper and Lower Canada. Dollars were officially rated by the British authorities at $4 for each £1. A quarter Spanish dollar (a two-real coin or 25 cent piece) would therefore be worth £0.0625.

Since an English pound contained 240 pence, that meant a quarter Spanish dollar was worth 15 English pennies, or 30 half-pennies. And given that Quebecers referred to half-pennies as sous, that gave rise to the ongoing practice of referring to 25 cents as 30 sous. When they use this term today, Quebecers are just referring to the archaic exchange rate between Spanish dollars and pence.

Source: La Maison nationale des Patriotes

This odd system of conversion really hits home when you work through the above scrip note emitted by Distillerie St-Denis, printed in 1837.  It is denominated in three different units. Trente-sous appears twice in French and once as XXX, while in the English paragraph near the bottom the £/s/d equivalent of one shilling and three pence, or fifteen English pennies, appears. Finally, a two-real coin, or quarter dollar—the pillars of Hercules side showing—has been emblazoned smack in the centre.

To end things off, you can also see a ghost of the old Spanish dollar in Venezuela's 12½ centimos coin. This coin is an eight of a bolivar—reckoning in terms of eights and sixteenths is a hallmark of the days of the old pillar coin.

Venezuela's strange 12.5 cent coin. It's a descendant of the famous Spanish dollar, divisible into eighth bits. pic.twitter.com/rVWmVkcdQO

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) May 20, 2016

Given Venezuela's ongoing hyperinflation, the likely destiny of the 12½ centimos coin is to be nothing more than another two-bit dead coin.

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Sources:
George Selgin, Good Money
A. Piatt Andrew, The End of the Mexican Dollar (link)
J.B. Caldecott. The Spanish Dollar as Adapted for Currency in Our West Indian Colonies (link)

A 1795 Spanish dollar, minted in Mexico, with several chopmarks

One of the most interesting things about bitcoin, ripple, and other cryptocurrencies is how they are maintained by a dispersed user base rather than some central issuing authority. These users (miners in the case of bitcoin, nodes for ripple) ensure that each "coin" is a legitimate member of the total population of cryptocoins comprising that particular ledger. They are what stand between good coin and bad coin.

I've run into two historical cases of a dispersed method of policing of the quality of exchange media: the endorsement of bills of exchange and the chopmarking of silver coins. It may be worthwhile to explore these two cases.

The Watchdog role

The watchdog or verification function is an important one, especially in anonymous trade where the unlikelihood of a repeat meeting between buyer and seller increases the incentives to be dishonest and pass off lousy coin. Not-so-liquid goods, say sofas, are insulated from the bad coin problem. Due to physical characteristics that impede their liquidity, sofas tend to be sold from fixed locations, or shops. Because a merchant is shackled to his shop and thus unable to preserve his anonymity, any attempt to pass off bad sofas will hurt his business reputation. In the end, only good sofas get stocked by the merchant.

Unfortunately for him, the merchant faces the danger that his much more mobile customers may try and sell him bad coin. The merchant can always threaten them with an embargo should they fob off a fake, but his customers will simply avoid his penalty by shopping at a competing merchant the next time they want a sofa.

In the case of paper money and coinage, the merchant is somewhat protected from the bad coin problem by difficult-to-counterfeit designs printed on the bill or engraved on a coin's face by the issuing authority. In the case of bank money, he is protected by the owners of the credit card networks who approve the legitimacy of a card prior to consummation of trade. These are centralized watchdog systems. What is interesting is that a number of decentralized, or dispersed systems have evolved in times past to offer further protection, including the use of chopmarks:

Chopmarking

In the 16th C, Spanish silver dollars, or pieces of eight, began to appear in China. These coins were minted in Spanish-controlled Mexico, shipped by Spanish vessels to the Philippines where they were exchanged for Chinese goods like porcelain and spices, and finally brought to China by Chinese and other foreign merchants.

Minted on the reverse side with a Christian cross and the obverse side with a Spanish coat of arms, and covered over with Latin characters, the patterning of the Spanish dollar would have meant little to the typical Chinese consumer or merchant. In fact, any pattern would have done just as well since silver was traditionally not accepted at its face value in China, but by its weight (this contrasts to the west, where Spanish dollars were typically accepted at face value). This may have been partly due to the fact that silver ingots, or sycee, had circulated in China long before the piece of eight ever made an appearance, with each city having its own particular standard. Because these sycee circulated according to weight, prior to consummating a trade, merchants would use a set of scales, or dotchin, to determine the value of each ingot.

While anyone with a set of scales could easily ascertain the weight of a particular coin, the difficult part would have been determining the purity of that coin. Counterfeit Spanish dollars were not uncommon, after all, but not everyone would have had the skills to detect them. This is where chopmarking came in handy. Merchants and professional money exchangers, or shroffs, would assay a coin to verify its silver content. The theory goes that once the coin had passed their purity test, a shroff would stamp that coin with his own peculiar chopmark—a Chinese character, an emblem, symbol, or a pseudo character.

Numismaticist Bruce Smith describes the reason for chopping thusly:

I think the chop was only a guarantee that it was acceptable silver. It didn't really matter if the coin was genuine or not. As long as it had the right weight and right fineness as far as they could tell. I mean they were only looking at it by eye and by sound. If it looked like the silver was good and it sounded good [the ‘ring’] and the weight was acceptable then it was okay.

According to Frank Rose, a numismatist who published an early text on chop marks, certain merchants chopmarked every legitimate coin that came into their possession and would readily take back any coin bearing one of their earlier marks. So by chopmarking a coin, a merchant would have been taking on a liability of his own, almost as if he had issued a redeemable paper note or a deposit.

In any case, foreign coins often became so covered in chop marks during the course of trade that their initial design became unrecognizable, as the coin below shows.

1807 Spanish dollar with chopmarks

The genius of this system is that a naive Chinese consumer could safely accept a coin knowing that as long as it was chopped it had successfully passed the smell test of professional appraisers--and the more chops the better. Chopping, like bitcoin mining, transformed a virgin coin into the native exchange medium, with chopmarks serving as a way for disparate users to verify a coin's membership in the set of good silver pieces.

Endorsing

Another interesting form of dispersed verification was the system of bills of exchange, especially the system that developed in Lancashire, a county in northern England. A bill of exchange was a paper contract between two sides in a transaction. It was created or 'drawn' up by the person who provided goods or services, the 'drawer'. The counterparty who had taken position of goods stood as the 'acceptor' and by signing the bill, promised to render up a certain amount of coins to the drawer, usually three months hence. The drawer kept the bill in his desk until three months had passed upon which he presented it to the acceptor, got his gold, and the two parted ways.

A bill of exchange, 1843 [link]

In the early 1700s, English commercial law began to accept the practice of transferring debts, or negotiability. Rather than the drawer keeping the note in desk, he could transfer it to a third party. The drawer would typically do so in exchange for some good or service, and would go about this by endorsing it, or signing his own signature on the back. By endorsing the bill, the drawer had become a co-signatory.

When the bill was due the third party could call on the original acceptor for payment, even though the original agreement had been between the drawer and the acceptor. Should the third party find the acceptor unable to pay the gold upon maturity, he could make a claim on the endorser for full payment. Alternatively, the third party could in turn endorse the bill on to someone else, who could it turn endorse it to someone else, etc. turning what had been an illiquid bill into a highly liquid and potent medium of exchange.

This is exactly what happened in Lancashire, according to this paper by T.S. Ashton. Not only were bills used by large scale industry, but according to Ashton they were used in small transactions too. While coin was generally reserved for the payment of wages, those a little higher in economic status than hired workers, small-capitalist spinners and small time manufacturers with an apprentice or two, were induced to accept payment in Lancashire bills. According to Henry Thornton, who Ashton quotes, all payments at Liverpool and Manchester - then part of Lancashire - were carried out either in coin or bills of exchange. Henry Dunning Macleod describes bills "which had sometimes 150 indorsements on them before they became due."

The practice of endorsement was hugely advantageous for the general populace, for as Ashton points out:

"Since each successive holder endorsed it, the more it circulated the greater the number of guarantors of its ultimate payment in cash. Even if some of the parties to it should be men of doubtful credit it might still circulate, for it was unlikely that they would go down simultaneously."

So in the same way that multiple chop marks and blockchain confirmations ensure that a coin is a good one, multiple endorsements converted an IOU into a member of the population of verified IOUs, and therefore suitable for broad circulation. In the end, what bitcoin and the other cryptocoins is certainly novel, but we have seen parts of this story before.