Paved the way for the downfall of physical money, and over a century of warfare in the absence of any sort of monetary discipline.
Thankfully we now have the necessary tool to fill that vaccuum.
When the pound replaced the Spanish silver dollar as the default global currency, it did so with a nascent international banking system where banknotes issued by a certain bank in a certain location could be exchanged by other banks in other locations.
Payments were thus often settled in metal rather than being transacted with it.
I was surprised to realise bank notes used to be tied to a bank, not a state.
There were major wars for millenia before the invention of the telegraph. They even names like "The Hundred Years War".