Ever since people abandoned natural exchange in favor of money, they have become the eternal companions of human civilization. Moreover, in all countries of the world, without exception, the emission of funds is regulated by the state. Any attempt to issue your own money is punishable by law. This was before the advent of blockchains - electronic money with emission uncontrolled by any state on the planet. At the same time, the most interesting thing is that in the USSR there were also several types of cryptocurrency. This ersatz money was also not controlled by the state, but had free circulation throughout the country.
Liquid money
Officially, the concept of cryptocurrency denotes a type of means of payment, the issue of which is not subject to the state, but which is accepted as payment throughout the country. Most of the readers who have met the Soviet era remember very well such concepts untranslatable into other languages of the world as half a liter or "can", meaning five hundred grams of vodka, brandy or alcohol. On the territory of the USSR, for such "liquid currency" one could get anything: domestic services, consumer goods, the right to a place in the queue to receive certain social benefits. True, there were no clear prices for how many bottles of vodka a particular service cost, of course. The price, as they would say today, was negotiable. Nevertheless, alcohol could always pay off with plumbers, movers, builders or drivers. They gave bribes with vodka for household services. Moreover, if today any person with a powerful computer can independently produce modern cryptocurrency - blockchains, then under the Soviet regime, any citizen could drive moonshine at home, exchanging it for the services he needed. Moonshiners, of course, were caught, but this did not stop either consumers or producers of "liquid currency".
Coupons - Soviet-style cryptocurrency
At the same time, it should be noted that not only alcohol was used in the USSR as an analogue of money. Along with banknotes in the country since the Civil War, there were coupons for food and household goods. When hard times came in the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War or perestroika, the goods most demanded by the population began to be issued with coupons. As an example, we can recall the famous ration cards of besieged Leningrad. At the end of the eighties, it came to the point that not only vodka, sugar, cereals and canned food began to be given out on coupons, coupons for the purchase of industrial goods and clothing in stores were distributed among the population of large cities. In Moscow, these were GUM, TSUM and Detsky Mir. It got to the point that salaries at a number of enterprises were issued with coupons,who independently printed their manuals to settle accounts with their employees. With such coupons it was possible to purchase the products of the enterprise in order to sell them later. It was in those years that people who sold chandeliers, power tools, knitwear, and those that were produced by city enterprises appeared on the roadsides of the highways near small towns.
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Children's cryptocurrency
The most amazing thing is that in the late USSR there was even a children's cryptocurrency. She was presented with inserts and candy wrappers from chewing gum brought from abroad. Believe it or not, in the 1980s, a collection of inserts depicting Turbo cars could be traded in for a set of imported markers, a trendy T-shirt or a skateboard. There was also a cryptocurrency in the pioneer camps. As a rule, it was analogous to the coupons used by the adult population of the country. It was carried out by the administration of the children's institution. These coupons could be obtained for work for the benefit of the pioneer camp, and then exchanged for sweets, sports equipment or toys.
Dmitry Sokolov