Barter: From Silent Trade to Pepsi's Soviet Navy and the Blockchain

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In the spring of 1989, PepsiCo took ownership of 17 Soviet submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer, paid for with soft drink syrup. To explain how that happened, this episode first dismantles the textbook story of barter. Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that early economies ran on swapping goods until the double coincidence of wants forced the invention of money. Anthropologists such as David Graeber and Marcel Mauss found no evidence that any such society existed. Neighbors ran on trust and social debt. Barter was for strangers, sometimes conducted without a word in the ritual known as silent trade.

From there the story follows barter wherever money fails or is refused: fishermen trading their catch for flour in hyperinflationary Venezuela, the barter clubs of Argentina's depression, Josiah Warren's Cincinnati Time Store and its labor notes, and the mutual credit ledgers known as LETS. Corporations then borrowed the clearinghouse idea, tax authorities followed, and smart contracts now match multi-party swaps in milliseconds.

• Argentina's barter clubs served an estimated 2.5 million people at their peak and printed their own scrip, including the credito and the nodine, short for no dinero.
• Pepsi shipped syrup in exchange for rights to sell Stolichnaya vodka in the West. When vodka could not cover an expanded deal, the Soviets handed over warships, which Pepsi sold to a Swedish shipyard for scrap.
• The Swiss WIR Bank, founded in 1934, still lets small businesses trade on proprietary credit, and Bartercard has processed over 10 billion US dollars in trade.
• Welder Karl Hess bartered his labor in the 1970s as tax resistance. The 1982 TEFRA Act then required barter exchanges to report members' transactions on Form 1099-B.
• Australia's tax office treats a free luxury handbag given to an influencer for a promotional post as a taxable barter transaction at retail value.