50 Bolivianos

Banco Potosí was one of several Bolivian provincial banks authorized under the 1871 banking law, which permitted private note issuance decades before Bolivia established a central bank. The American Bank Note Company contract work here is characteristic of the period — Bolivian provincial banks almost universally turned to ABNC rather than European houses, partly for cost, partly because ABNC actively courted Latin American clients throughout the 1870s and 1880s.

Potosí's historical identity as the site of Cerro Rico — the silver mountain that funded the Spanish colonial treasury for two centuries — gives the bank's very existence a certain irony. By 1887, the silver economy that built the city was in structural decline, undercut by falling global silver prices and the shift toward gold-standard regimes elsewhere.