(From the entry on "Money," by Charles Francis Bastable, in the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica): The very large number of the autonomous cities of Greece, which possessed the right of issuing money, was the cause of the competition between different currencies, each having legal…
OK, I'm being melodramatic. But the question actually posed by the PanAm Post, "Will Bitcoin's Fixed Money Supply Be Its Downfall?", was only slightly less so. They had me take the "yes" position. But as my doubts about Bitcoin's future are far from certain, I was delighted…
This is a revised excerpt from White (2015), and the first item in our "What You Should Know" series offering essential background information on various alternative money themes. Historical monetary systems that are properly classified as free banking systems, in Kevin Dowd’s (1992, p. 2) words, have…
As devoted followers of this blog already know, one of my (many) free-banking hobbyhorses concerns counterfeiting. Assuming similar penalties for convicted counterfeiters, is a system of competing suppliers of redeemable paper currency more or less likely to encourage counterfeiting than a currency monopoly? Having sketched-out some basic…