Barter Then & Now
Dave Birch at the excellent Digital Money Forum discusses how at a time in the not so distant past Americans reverted to Barter. In fact with no real money around in the Great Depression, people started to print their own money, called “scrip”.
Scrip enabled trade to continue outside the official financial systems. Scrip was just one effect of a time when people began to establish mutual support structures like cooperatives which would recycle items. Besides sharing what they had, people also used barter to to facilitate “payment”.
Fast forward to today and what do you get? Check out Swaptree. Using this site/web application, you set up two lists, stuff you want to trade and stuff you want to get. Swaptree uses technology and its network to set up all the trades. If necessary, it will use as many as four users to make a trade happen - the person with the item you want doesn’t need to want something you have. TechCrunch has a good write up on Swaptree.
By the way, when you think about it, modern gift cards are in many ways today’s version of “scrip”.
