Crypto is taking the financial world by storm I know that many people are scared by the impact that crypto can have on the way money is perceived in the future, maybe no more central banks, maybe no more government direct bearing in money matters (I seriously doubt these two players will take this calmly and without fighting back).

But you know as far as central banks go, I can see for a fact that these entities at least in my country Honduras during the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth was not in existence. In fact I have seen that sometimes private banks issued coins and bills and , get this, during the last 50 years I have lived just in three different places. Utila which is a small island off the coast of Honduras and when I was there had a population of 2,000, Olanchito which is a medium sized town and La Ceiba a larger more prosperous and developed small city.

Now the thing is these three places, despite being very small in population and economic development except perhaps La Ceiba which was going through a banana boom each had its own coins, I can vouch for this because even though I do not own any of them I have seen several coins from each of these towns and have heard that they were legal tender just as good as anything the government could come out with. So in fact they were a step ahead of where crypto is at the moment.

Now was there anything backing these coins? Not that I know of, in Utila's case the only thing that could have backed it was fish, in Olanchito which at that time had no banana farms owned by US companies only cattle and certain agricultural products. La Ceiba could maybe back it with bananas and services. But still how could they compete with government issued money? And compete they did.

Until of course the government outlawed them and confiscated as many coins as they could. I think I will have to make a thorough investigation into this, I used to collect coins and still have a lot of them, so I am in fact well qualified to look into this. Do you know if this method of creating coins for small towns was a common practice all over the world or is it restricted to just certain areas?

I do know that these coins, as interesting as they are, hold hardly any commercial value and would be surprised if they sell for much more than their face value. But you can see a desire to be free from government intervention at times when these towns were actually not much more than villages.