What a load of bull. Historically, merchant-issued credit was the primary solution. Each merchant generated their own currency and maintained their own ledger. You know, decentralized, not a central issuer with a central ledger like Bitcoin.

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#[57] The closest electronic solution to the merchant-issued decentralized credit notes I've seen is Pear Credit, which is blockchain-free like Nostr and doesn't require maintenance or fees because they're not trying to maintain a single authoritative global state like Bitcoin. Free audio book "Debt: The First 5000 Years" by David Graeber here. A study of how people akshully traded before centrally issued brand name currencies, like USD or Bitcoin. http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/64160
it’s been a while since i read it, but doesn’t graeber argue that early credit based systems worked well in small networks where trust was high but didn’t work so well when transacting outside those networks?