During certain periods, governments would establish fixed price lists for common goods to accommodate those who found hard currency difficult to obtain. This measure aimed to facilitate the payment of fines or debts with tangible goods and to assign value to stolen items, thereby creating a standardized unit of account for transactions without the direct exchange of hard currency.

The conversation then shifts towards the concept of "social money" or "peer-to-peer (P2P) debt money," exemplified by systems like the original RipplePay. These systems are characterized by their reliance on mutual credit or IOUs instead of traditional currency. However, they face the challenge of depending on an external unit of account, which typically ends up being a conventional hard currency that coexists with the P2P money system. The idea of a centralized entity responsible for publishing a unit of account is proposed as a potentially innovative solution to this issue. Despite the inherent problems associated with centralization, this approach could offer a novel way to stabilize and standardize value within a P2P monetary system, avoiding the need for a parallel hard currency.