An intriguing thought. The economy around here for decades was operated on tokens and scrips. The coal mines paid their workers not in money, but in scrip which was redeemable only at the Company Store, then the coal companies imported life's necessities for purchase by the miners for that scrip (and of course got to set it's own prices, in scrip, for those commodities), so it was a "closed system" that worked fairly well. No need to negotiate external exchange rates when no external exchange is going on.
The military, too, used to be paid in scrip, called "MPC" which stood for "Military Pay Certificates", which could be exchanged by vendors with the military for "real" money.
In both cases, the systems were regulated by a higher authority - the company or the military - and those entities dealt with external exchange rates and the like, so that the common user didn't have to worry about it. They also controlled production and distribution of scrips so that common uses didn't have to worry about things like inflation in scrip value or counterfeiting. Those were the headaches of the "higher authorities" to contend with.
I think it's do-able, and would make a good adjunct to straight barter systems.
Governments would certainly make scrips unlawful if they got beyond certain parameters that might endanger use of their own counterfeit "currency", like CBDCs, but it would be a lot harder to control, I think, than the CBDCs, which is no doubt why they are going after CBDCs.
I'll be forced into the CBDC system eventually, as Social Security is not that far away for me. Before now, whenever I got government payments of any kind, I always took them off the card they were deposited to straightaway, and converted them to cash that could be stashed and not tracked. I'm not sure how I'll be able to do that going forward, but rest assured I will find a way. Burying a bank card in a mason jar in the woods, a card with nothing on it but imaginary "currency" like CBDCs anyhow, just doesn't have the same panache as burying mason jars full of metal coins in the woods, now does it?
As an aside, my first wife's grand dad buried mason jars full of golds coins somewhere on his farm, or around his farm as is more likely, in the 1940's and 1950's. He did that to hedge his bets, having lived through the Great Depression and seeing just how "stable" banks could be... and finding that stability lacking in the extreme. He eventually died of course, as we all do, without disclosing the location of the burials. To this day, none of those coins has yet been found, despite the fact that they were worth, at the time, about 30K dollars, and I have no idea what their inflated value would be now - certainly somewhere north of 300K dollars.
Those of us acquainted with folks who weathered the Great Depression have a healthy distrust of banks in general, which is why I NEVER allow a bank to hang on to MY money. If I keep it close to hand and tangible, instead of in imaginary numbers in a bank, I never have to worry about bank collapses or bank runs. It's already here, waiting to be used, not somewhere out there in the aether waiting to be stolen or vanished in a bank collapse. I won't have to stand in line in any bank runs, wondering if any cash will be left when it's my turn to cash in. Protip - it wouldn't be there, anyhow. Banks just don't keep much cash on hand. I once had to go to 3 different Bank of America locations before I found one with enough cash to cash out a measly 12,000 dollar check. Big bank like that, and no one had enough cash on hand to cash a little check like that. Lesson learned.
.
The military, too, used to be paid in scrip, called "MPC" which stood for "Military Pay Certificates", which could be exchanged by vendors with the military for "real" money.
In both cases, the systems were regulated by a higher authority - the company or the military - and those entities dealt with external exchange rates and the like, so that the common user didn't have to worry about it. They also controlled production and distribution of scrips so that common uses didn't have to worry about things like inflation in scrip value or counterfeiting. Those were the headaches of the "higher authorities" to contend with.
I think it's do-able, and would make a good adjunct to straight barter systems.
Governments would certainly make scrips unlawful if they got beyond certain parameters that might endanger use of their own counterfeit "currency", like CBDCs, but it would be a lot harder to control, I think, than the CBDCs, which is no doubt why they are going after CBDCs.
I'll be forced into the CBDC system eventually, as Social Security is not that far away for me. Before now, whenever I got government payments of any kind, I always took them off the card they were deposited to straightaway, and converted them to cash that could be stashed and not tracked. I'm not sure how I'll be able to do that going forward, but rest assured I will find a way. Burying a bank card in a mason jar in the woods, a card with nothing on it but imaginary "currency" like CBDCs anyhow, just doesn't have the same panache as burying mason jars full of metal coins in the woods, now does it?
As an aside, my first wife's grand dad buried mason jars full of golds coins somewhere on his farm, or around his farm as is more likely, in the 1940's and 1950's. He did that to hedge his bets, having lived through the Great Depression and seeing just how "stable" banks could be... and finding that stability lacking in the extreme. He eventually died of course, as we all do, without disclosing the location of the burials. To this day, none of those coins has yet been found, despite the fact that they were worth, at the time, about 30K dollars, and I have no idea what their inflated value would be now - certainly somewhere north of 300K dollars.
Those of us acquainted with folks who weathered the Great Depression have a healthy distrust of banks in general, which is why I NEVER allow a bank to hang on to MY money. If I keep it close to hand and tangible, instead of in imaginary numbers in a bank, I never have to worry about bank collapses or bank runs. It's already here, waiting to be used, not somewhere out there in the aether waiting to be stolen or vanished in a bank collapse. I won't have to stand in line in any bank runs, wondering if any cash will be left when it's my turn to cash in. Protip - it wouldn't be there, anyhow. Banks just don't keep much cash on hand. I once had to go to 3 different Bank of America locations before I found one with enough cash to cash out a measly 12,000 dollar check. Big bank like that, and no one had enough cash on hand to cash a little check like that. Lesson learned.
.