Thorgasail on Nostr: Those small networks were a very important service: helping people avoid the overhead ...

Those small networks were a very important service: helping people avoid the overhead of specie. Small easy to recognize coins were a speed trafeoff. Needing to weigh and assay each coin is onerous that's also why metal networks cannot defeat the fiat empire, physical metal is a fairly inefficient network.

But in the old days, it was a defacto homogenous silver system. Anyone with a strange silver coin could easily trade it on weight alone. Silver coins were accepted in China, despite the recipient not being able to read the coin or recognize whatever king's head was stamped onto it. It's a great model of a possible bitcoin future; a global tcpip of value.