[md_]

Well, the parent post was saying that people were initially hesitant to move to credit systems, so I'm confused. :)

If we're talking specifically about credit cards, the credit card went from new invention to ubiquity in a couple of decades. But I think that's too narrow a scope to look at, to be honest.

Early credit systems did not depend upon the printing press; think of the widespread use of tally sticks in medieval Europe to enable illiterate low-technology credit systems.

It's really hard to approach this anthropologically, IMO, because so many other variables change. Less complex economies do fine with "local communism" and person-to-person debt, but it's hard to imagine using such a thing to order from Amazon. Conversely, coinage historically was useful if you had to exchange with someone with whom you didn't have a personal relationship (say, you're traveling to a faraway land and you can't just provide an IOU), but that's somewhat obsolete now.

I guess my conclusion would be that these historical analogies don't shed a lot of light.