Maybe something related to divisibility? It seems less appealing to create one such unit if they used shells. Why would you create a unit called shells2 equivalent to 1.5 shells?
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I do not see an essential difference between mints and banks in this sense. In both you need to trust third-party and potentially also transacting party depending on how easy was to counterfeit
The metal in coins can be validated. It's costly, not done at retail, but was often done by bankers and merchants. So people who dealt with coins on large and international scales could use coins in a trust-minimized way. But nobody can use bank notes in a trust-minimized way.
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I see. You mean that in principle you can validate a metal's weigth, but it is harder to asses what is backing a banknote? If one could know bank assets this problem would be at least partially solved?
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If the assets are trust-minimized collateral (i.e. bank doesn't have the ability to just transfer them out). Otherwise, the audit just tells you that the funds have not been absconded with or withheld from creditors *yet* -- useful but much less trust-minimized than Lightning.
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Ok, so the essential difference is that with commodity money you *can* validate money quality with technology that doesn't rely on people, just physics. However, this technology is costly. Mints help reduce physical validation costs but now you need to validate *them* 1/2
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As for the transacting party, they become a problem as long as one doesn't use the physical technology to validate. When this is the case, mints help reduce this problem but not altogether.
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Finally from this perspective what banks do is to change the game by relying *only* on people since they choose the physical appearence of the banknotes, can unilaterally print more of them, and choose the assets to back these
End of conversation
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