America is Born into Private CurrencyEarly America offers powerful lessons about private currencies.The British colonies naturally used British currency, but the homeland’s monetary policies created an appetite for alternative monies. Rothbard explained in A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War, II (2002), “Great Britain was officially on a silver standard….However, Britain also coined gold and maintained a bimetallic standard,,,,In 17th- and 18th-century Britain, the government maintained a mint ratio between gold and silver that consistently overvalued gold and undervalued silver in relation to world market prices.” Great Britain’s policies created a robust market in substitutes for its own money.
Source: The Satoshi Revolution – A Revolution of Rising Expectations