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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

> It’s not like the alternative to gold coins two millennia ago was a traceable currency

There actually was, predating gold coins in fact. What people did was carve notches representing quantities into sticks. The sticks were then split down the middle such that they could be lined back up to verify that both came from the original stick and the notches lined up. One of these halves would then often be entrusted to local officials for safekeeping. When people wanted to settle accounts, they could meet up with their half of the stick, light them up and make new cuts.

(Of course this doesn't prove that gold coins were created to facilitate anonymity.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick

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Credit came before currency. The oldest civilizations we know of (Sumerians, Babylonians, etc.) traded on credit on the daily to be later settled come harvest. "Okay, I owe the bar for 100 barley beers, it's harvest time and they have to pay their taxes too. I'll pay 100 barley beers in grain to the taxman in their name when I go pay mine."

I don’t see how a Tally stick results in non-anonymous transactions. It’s just a basic way to create an arbitrary non-fungible physical token, just like a door key.

The authorities holding the sticks are acting as a public ledger, in that they bear witness to person A originally handing them half of stick A — and they could write that association down, if they like (picture a little tag saying "person A" wrapped around stick A in their stick storage closet); but even if they don't write it down, they may just remember the person, remember the probably-pretty-unique-looking stick, and mentally associate the two.

Then, when person B comes around with the other half of stick A, they won't know all the hands it passed through in the meantime, but they'll at least know that person A and person B were connected through some chain of equal-value trades that didn't require "breaking" the stick.

Yeah I’m not seeing people being so dreadfully about “authorities” knowing who random people happened to participate in an arbitrarily long line of trades as being a big factor in people moving to gold coinage.

Notable people resorted to things like Tally sticks when actual physical currency like gold was in short supply. So the idea that people moved from Tally sticks to gold due to concerns for privacy just doesn’t hold water. Especially given gold as currency predates Tally sticks.

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