Stamps had become the new parallel currency, functioning like cigarettes used to".
(The answer, as in 1890 when Barings collapsed was to borrow money from friendly foreign central banks).As the monetary system evolved, the currency guarantor function of the central banks changed with it.
While arguing that a common currency cannot function without common fiscal policies, the ECB is playing a much more overtly political role than it did before the crisis when, on the model of Germany's Bundesbank, it restricted itself to monetary policy-making, inflation-fighting, and jealously guarded its independence.
Currency boards function with foreign reserves backing the monetary base.
Given the loss of Greece's independent currency creating function, the repo mechanism was likely the only way to get "vertical money" into Greece, once ECB stopped expanding its balance sheet as the crisis died down.
But instead of currency, it functions as a decentralized replacement for the Internet's Domain Name System.
Yesterday Bitstamp shut down "accregistration, login & all virtual currency withdrawal functions," as it investigated the effect of Heartbleed on its servers.
Meanwhile, the dollar, while painfully weak against many foreign currencies, still functions as the international medium of exchange.
The currency intervention also functions as a massive inequality-creation machine.
