Someone asked what I meant by “groß Geld” and “kleine Geld”. It’s this concept of “big” money and “small” money that circulate simultaneously in two overlapping systems. Historically this was about denominations of hard currency. In Europe, pennies were the workhorse for small transactions, and while pounds, dollars, groats, and others were utilized by merchants and long distance trade networks. India and East Asia and Africa had their own versions. We don’t make this distinction today very much because ledger money in a bank or fintech or blockchain address have become liquid, reducing the need for physical currency. But vestiges of “big” and “small” money can still be seen even in the US - you’ve probably seen stores that won’t accept bills larger than $20. $100 dollar notes are squarely in the big money category - they are compact and portable compared to 100x $1 notes. This is why $100 notes make up most of the paper currency supply, and also have a tendency to be shipped overseas to other countries. Anyway, this imbalance is not a new phenomenon, and makes sense from a financial perspective. The cost to mint a copper farthing ≈ the cost to mind a silver dollar; the cost to print a $1 note ≈ the cost to print a $100 note. And then you need to transport that heavy currency out into the countryside. So areas far from a mint would tend to have currency shortages since the transport makes distribution costly, and if that currency, the mint would be biased towards making the higher denomination coins due to fixed costs being about the same. Bringing this back to stablecoins, this currency shortage is historically what allows private currencies to flourish. Tether does this today - they supply dollar-like assets in regions with a chronic shortage of dollars. That it happens on Tron and Ethereum rather than an AWS server is almost a quirk of history than an actual feature for most users. But it also means most private currencies have been small money to allow day-to-day transactions to not revert to barter. What makes Tether special is that they answer a shortage of *big money* as well as small money. The last time that occurred on a global scale was the proliferation of silver dollars from the Habsburg kings of Spain, which most major currencies forked to give us USD, yen, yuan, pesos, etc. So it may feel very distant from crypto, but the history of small and big money, with especially rich histories in east Asia, Europe, and North America, is deeply interwoven with the primary source of demand for private currencies (aka stablecoins). It’s way down at the very bottom of the stack of just having enough hard currency in circulation to avoid barter.