We've brought a fifty-year-old book on the history of Scottish banking back into print. For over a century, Scotland ran a stable banking system with no central bank. Banks issued their own notes, redeemable on demand. Competition kept them honest. Banknotes circulated so widely that gold and silver nearly disappeared from circulation, and in a crisis, rival banks would hold each other's notes to keep the whole system standing. We're financial history obsessives, and early Scottish banking is the closest precedent we've found to what stablecoins are today: private money competing in a free market system for people's deposits. Checkland called it banking in its purest form. The whole story is in the book. Scottish Banking: A History, 1695–1973, by SG Checkland, expanded with a new foreword from Steakhouse. On sale now. Find out more at