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gunshai | 1 year ago

If you look closely in the first image you can tell that some of those coins are "clipped" then the coin with ridges is not clipped.

The ridges are to mitigate "clipping" which is the process of removing JUUUUUST enough metal from the coin as to not raise suspicion and people trade with them, but not enough to raise suspicion and get ... well killed by the Monarchy.

Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating. There is a guy at University of Arizona who has a course on Youtube that covers this subject, HIGHLY recommend.

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sandworm101|1 year ago

Not all clipping was illegal, or even nefarious. It was only a crime where there was a solid national currency system, which was far from universal. Many people would be trading in a variety of currencies, none of which was specifically backed by any laws forbidding clipping. Clipping would become so common that anyone with good coins was a fool not to clip them down to the local norm. There was also a general lack of small change in the ancient world. Heavily clipped coins, or even their clippings, likely substituted for the lack of smaller denominations. If a coin is worth its weight in silver, silver must be worth its weight in coins, clippings or not.

gunshai|1 year ago

Ya there isn't much here to dispute. However one side effect of this type of valuation was essentially the trust in measurement systems.

This created barriers to entry for valuation of money in the form of owning a scale that required higher precision in weight estimation. On top of that one can imagine that dispute that a merchants scale (this still probably happens even today) cheats was most likely common place.

It's fairly easy to imagine a cleverly placed point of additional friction can "tip the scales" in a merchants favor.

All that to say it would have been good to be in the "measurement" business way back in the day. Hell it's still a good business today, but we need it far less for the exchange of coinage/money which I think is a pretty great thing.

gwbas1c|1 year ago

> Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating.

The first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations also covers some of this. Specifically I remember the clipping topic, and then landlords weighing payments to protect themselves from clipping.

cjs_ac|1 year ago

Weighing coins was always the preferred way of counting money. The pound sterling is called the pound sterling because 240 mediaeval pennies minted from sterling silver weighed one pound.

gunshai|1 year ago

An interesting side effect of clipping was essentially the discovery of Gresham's Law. The Bad Money drives out good money. While essentially understood/internalized by the merchant class plebiscite(heh) for thousands of years, wasn't formalized until the mid 1800s.

For clipping it means that when new coinage is minted that money is typically horded and the clipped coins are kept in circulation because they are deemed less valuable then their nominal value (the initial weight of the coin).

Why would someone use something more valuable in an exchange when the thing that's less valuable will suffice?

Gresham's Law would end up plaguing monarchy's and various governments for millenia and still to this day really.

We vastly under appreciate the very basic technology used to solve problems that existed for pretty much the entire world for thousands of years.