[sandworm101]

Not all clipping was illegal, or even nefarious. It was only a crime where there was a solid national currency system, which was far from universal. Many people would be trading in a variety of currencies, none of which was specifically backed by any laws forbidding clipping. Clipping would become so common that anyone with good coins was a fool not to clip them down to the local norm. There was also a general lack of small change in the ancient world. Heavily clipped coins, or even their clippings, likely substituted for the lack of smaller denominations. If a coin is worth its weight in silver, silver must be worth its weight in coins, clippings or not.

[gunshai]

Ya there isn't much here to dispute. However one side effect of this type of valuation was essentially the trust in measurement systems.

This created barriers to entry for valuation of money in the form of owning a scale that required higher precision in weight estimation. On top of that one can imagine that dispute that a merchants scale (this still probably happens even today) cheats was most likely common place.

It's fairly easy to imagine a cleverly placed point of additional friction can "tip the scales" in a merchants favor.

All that to say it would have been good to be in the "measurement" business way back in the day. Hell it's still a good business today, but we need it far less for the exchange of coinage/money which I think is a pretty great thing.