How many markets have there been in history that don't have some kind of central authority involved - to issue the money used if nothing else?

Edit: Of course there have been barter based markets, but aren't markets actually more effective when there is a central authority?

That's not the goal of markets. You don't get to have the Universal market.

A market is a way to organize a group of people in a decentralized way, but its existence and correct operation requires a different, centralized group that manages it. Market participants are decentralized, market regulators are not. Now, the solution for the "what if I don't want centralization in the market regulation space?" problem is recursion. You create a market for markets.

What happens if you don't centralize? You get something like global trade, which is a meta-market for national trade markets (which are centralized). Global trade is decentralized - in the sense that men with most guns tell everyone else what to do, because there's no central authority to prevent that.

Markets existed millennia before fiat currencies did. Even now, if you look at the world economy instead of an individual economy, there are lots of separate authorities rather than one central one (though, granted, the US government still has quite a bit of power.)

One can argue black markets don't have a central authority and are more effective