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I would presume that if someone like Bilbo came back to The Shire with a lot of gold that was not in the form of Shire currency then he would have had to exchange it in some way.
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Not really. Historically speaking, people were not always nearly as finicky about the…err…”national origin” (an extremely clumsy expression, but I don’t know how else to put it) of currency. This was because the issue at stake was the value of the metal itself (often easily expressed in weight or comparison to other metals), not the relative credit of the coin’s nation of origin. The gold would have been gold and spendable in a money economy that had experience with gold (and I am presuming that the Shire did based on general common sense and the points made by Rumil) whether the coins happened to be stamped with the head of Thror, King Under the Mountain or stamped with the head of Isumbras III, Thain of the Shire.