An Irish friend of mine was always very reluctant to tell me her age.
One day while discussing her history she mentioned that an Irish bank she had been working for went on strike for several months. This was when she was 19, after finishing high school school. Because I knew that the strike she was referring to must have been the one in the summer of 1976, I had no trouble knowing her age.
Strikes of this nature have always been of interest to me. It was a strike of the Grayline tour bus company in 1972 that allowed me to start the modern diverse thriving tour business in San Francisco.
There were several Irish banking strikes in the decade before 1976. The Irish had learned to do without bank accounts.
Initially people wrote checks to each other. But they quickly learned that the checks couldn’t be cashed. So the checks were passed around with each person signing on the back for a few weeks. Soon people recognized that adding signatures was irrelevant.
Most people checked the names of the Issuer and the first signer to determine if the check was good. If both parties were known to be trustworthy the check was treated as cash.
The whole point to me was that people very quickly find ways to create a currency system. Of course the underlying nature of that currency system is trust.
It was about this time that I went to Japan to create and buy a large batch of special mulberry paper. I had already commissioned a design firm to create a currency for use in the Briarpatch. After talking to business people and validating the potential success of the currency I decided not to do it. It was going to consume too much of my time being a banker.