Silver coins were an excellent instrument of payment in the seventeenth century, but given its high weight and value, its use and transport involved high risks and costs. Is it possible to estimate those costs? So far, we know how much the Spanish Crown paid to its bankers for money transport, but how much did the bankers themselves pay? And how much did other economic agents pay? What was cheaper: the use of bills of exchange or that of coins? How did the export of precious metals work in Spain?
