>bartering A total myth. Only occurs in places where a peg is established to currency outside the environment, e.g. prisons. The very few anthropological examp

>bartering A total myth. Only occurs in places where a peg is established to currency outside the environment, e.g. prisons. The very few anthropological examples of bartering occur between travelers who do not meet each other again for mutual fear of jealousy. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is required reading: https://annas-archive.org/md5/af5cf10f842d46b32a893be4ff52ba4d https://annas-archive.org/md5/af5cf10f842d46b32a893be4ff52ba... What happens after apocalypse is people return to providing goods and services on credit. Once every month a communal reckoning brings the community together and debts are cancelled out in a circle. If you have lived in a small eastern-European village filled with hen-farming babushkas, beekeepers and craftsmen as I have in Hungary you will recognize this to an extent even today. The commoner's social life and trade is inexorably linked. Even the wholesale traders who did make use of cash only settled using it once every few weeks or so, reminiscent of the hawala, fei chien (Chinese flying money), and other ancient mirror transfer systems. While debt was nominally denominated in it among peasants, only standing armies (Rome & USA), mercenaries, criminals, and nomadic peoples/traveling merchants ever held on to cash for longer than a moment. Acceptance of money to settle debts is the legitimacy of a state's monopoly on violence expressed in units. Why would I give you a sandwich for your monero in our fallout scenario? Monero is only worth anything today because someone will buy it from you for dollars. Why are dollars worth something? Because the U.S. Gov requires you to accept it for debts and they control the printing of it. If the government loses the ability to enforce that everything reliant on it falls with it. They are able to enforce it by way of the most powerful, violent standing army the world has seen.