How many camels or cows do you pay for this bride? – supposedly this sentence is still used in some areas of the planet, where livestock is essential to survive the harsh circumstances of Mother Nature. In other cultures, metal parts, grains, seashells or even round stones were used as money.

In modern war times, in countries where hyperinflation annihilated the value of money, people were paying with eggs, cigarettes or US-dollars, even with nylon stockings what was a hot product in that time. (World War II.) Money is what people accept as money.

Before 1798, about 75 entities were making coins in Switzerland, including the 25 cantons and half-cantons, 16 cities, and abbeys, resulting in about 860 different coins in circulation, with different values, denominations and monetary systems. (Wikipedia)

Thousands of shiny coins

In the middle ages in Europe, a lot of independent, “free” cities, barons or other nobles, church institutions, rebel groups issued, minted money. I suppose thousands of them, in centuries. Partly decentralized money, may be, but with a lot of disadvantages.

The most important factor was the metal content of the coins. Money-changer had a hard work, analysing and scaling, measuring all the different pieces, calculating rates.

Matter of seconds

Having so much different cryptocurrencies, doesn’t mean we return to the middle ages. Today it is a matter of minutes or seconds to exchange them, one to other. (At least the liquid ones, with considerable volume of trade and small margins between offer and bid.)

But not all of them are currencies, off-crypto-world critics are often confounding cryptocurrencies and tokens.

Many will die out

On Coinmarketcap.com there are 1601 titles now, from this 895 are “coins”, 792 “tokens”. Total: 1687, I suppose some cryptos are considered mixed forms, coins and tokens at the same time. Many people are thinking that great part of them will die out, not because cryptos won’t work. Just like 8-9 of every 10 startup companies pretend to fail. This is normal in business world.

Old 17-18. century coins in a museum in Central Europe.
In modern digital times, as you can move, exchange the tokens in the matter of minutes or seconds, every token can be moved quickly, most of them can be used as a medium of exchange, just like money.

Chips and queens

But ancient world critics, amusing themselves at the 1600 cryptos, have short memories: tokens also possess a lot of antecedents. All we know the chips in the casinos. In many countries, some decades ago, you had to buy metallic tokens, coins to use the public phones. Older parking token coins, with nice oldtimer cars or Queen Elisabeth II. on one side, are the treasures of some coin collectors.

The most interesting part: In Pompeii, the volcano-buried city of the ancient romans, 2000 years ago, tokens, “spintria” could be used in “hothouses” (brothels). Every token had an other erotic scene, position, which was paid for, and could be used only for this special form of… service. (See more here if you are above 18.)

Drink with tokens

There was another time in the 80’-90’s as almost all of us were using prepaid phone cards to use public phones, that seems to be also a newer form of tokenization, version semi-digital.

In music festivals, concerts people often have to buy special tokens or paper tickets to pay their food and drink. In modern days, an electronic version of this, is when rechargeable digital bracelets or magnetic cards are used. Some sort of mobile wallets, with limited use.

Receiving, not giving

But in all the above cases you use your tokens or wallets basically to pay something. Crypto-tokens are much more advanced, you can earn them, you can save and hold them (ever hoarding parking tokens?), sometimes you can mine them.

You can be rewarded with tokens for a lot of activities, work, business, content, advertising etc.

200 years old model

I’m surprised but this model – incentivize people with tokens – is 200 years old. On Wikipedia you can find a description of the “token economy”, from a psychological point of view. Beginning from the early 19th century, in schools and prisons:

A token economy is a system of contingency management based on the systematic reinforcement of target behavior. The reinforcers are symbols or "tokens" that can be exchanged for other reinforcers. A token economy is based on the principles of operant conditioning and behavioral economics and can be situated within applied behavior analysis. (…) In applied settings, a wide range of tokens have been used: coins, checkmarks, images of small suns, points on a counter.

Because we all are loving if we are rewarded, so we feel important and valuable.

A last word:

In applied settings token economies are used with children and adults; however, they have been successfully modeled with pigeons in lab settings. (Wikipedia)

Funny. We are all little pigeons piggies apes.
(Photos: own work.)

Summary:

• The use of many types of money at the same time is nothing new, in Europe was happening the same during many centuries.
• Cryptocurrencies are much more useful as ancient coins.
• Many people criticizing cryptocurrencies, not even know the difference between coins and tokens.
• Tokens are nothing new either, are based on psychological, behaviorist theories and practices of 200 years.