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I totally agree. It has always seemed to me that the least stressful way of accomplishing any currency change would be to offer it as an alternative. People would catch on pretty quickly (as they have done since the Trudeau cash grab) what would be in their best interests. So if an exchange was established that existed outside of any Central Bank (hello crypto), people would eventually figure it out.

But hey... if they offer to wipe out all your debt because it was all stolen (or nonexistent) money to begin with, I'm all for it.

Just yesterday, I was having a discussion with someone about these central banks and corporations. For the past 2-3 years, I have been combing through land deed documents in a southern state, searching for family history clues. When I was in the documents from the early 1800s, these transactions were fairly simple. A guy had "$40 in silver," or 100 dollars "current Virginia money" and he exchanged it for land and it was written into the land deed. Simple. Then when I got into the records starting about mid-1840s, I started realizing that everyone was going bankrupt! It was page after page of people losing their land, their livestock, their household furniture, their slaves. All going to auction on the front steps of the court house. Then in the 1850s it leveled off a bit, but still with the occasional bankruptcy noted in the deeds.

Now I am in the deeds of the 1870s and was specifically following the transactions of one of my shoestring ancestors who owned 130 acres of land. He is mortgaging off his crops in exchange for "provisions, seed and merchandise" in order to cultivate again the next year, and to pay off a $30 debt to a corporation of local rich guys. Then a year later, another record for the same agreement, this time he is in debt $41. And I can just see him sinking further into this quicksand. This was 1874 and I'm realizing that this is the first recorded account I have come across of a sharecropping agreement! I never found this in records prior to the civil war. If the whole 1871 incorporation thing is really true (and I would really like more information on that, as I've heard conflicting info) then I'm seeing it taking place in these records as I am going through them. But this "corporation" is local guys... and I would lay money on them all being on the local Masonic temple membership list.

The bankruptcies of 1840 were part of the Panic of 1837. Click here and scroll down to "America's Mixed Relationship with Gold" to understand what happened.

If your family extends into Oklahoma you might find lots of share cropper type records clear up until WW II. The Okie Sooners, in many cases were Northerners who grabbed the land then found others to farm it, showed up at harvest time to collect their cut. Then the better markets of the war years gave most of the farmers a means to buy their own land.