
Rai Stones - Thevet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
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_bxg1
> The monetary system of Yap relies on an oral history of ownership. In the
> case of stones that are too large to move, buying an item with one simply
> involves agreeing that the ownership has changed. As long as the transaction
> is recorded in the oral history, it will now be owned by the person to whom
> it is passed

> The extrinsic (perceived) value of a specific stone is based on not only its
> size and craftsmanship, but also its history. If many people—or no one at
> all—died when the specific stone was transported, or a famous sailor brought
> it in, the value of the rai stone increases by reason of its anecdotal heft.

So, it's Bitcoin.

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coralreef
Its a ledger but that's about it. Its not distributed, decentralized or
permissionless.

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_bxg1
The "oral history" part makes me think the "ledger" exists in the collective
memory of a community. Plus, the value is purely defined on how hard the
artifact was to get, not on any kind of intrinsic utility.

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mywacaday
So not a million miles away from Gold then

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_bxg1
Gold has some intrinsic utility. Even before electronics, it was useful as a
visible display of wealth and power, which did have very tangible value.

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jdc
And the whole malleability thing

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kragen
Keep this in mind when people claim that money is a modern invention, that it
dates from the Copper Age or later, or that it's dependent on the existence of
states.

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twomoretime
....it's really a stretch to call these stones "money."

Yes, they represent value, but other than that they practically immobile, non-
portable, non-fungible, and work entirely via word of mouth and rely on human
honesty...perhaps it's more appropriate to call it proto-money.

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carapace
It's proto-banking, eh? They skipped the earlier phases of finance.

It reminds me of the aliens in Douglas Adams' who, having fifty arms, are the
only species to invent under-arm deodorant before the wheel.

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kragen
Probably hard currencies started out as debt and title systems like the rai
stones.

If you look at a pidgin English dialect like Nigerian pidgin, and compare it
to British English or for that matter Nigerian non-pidgin English, you might
assume that pidgin English was the original form, since it's simpler, and that
British English evolved from it. But in fact the truth is the opposite: pidgin
English is a simplified version of English developed as a _lingua franca_ for
international communication.

The same seems to be true of hard currency and especially barter. Hard
currency is pidgin banking; barter is pidgin hard currency. Rai stones show us
the complexity of social arrangements surrounding money that in a homogeneous
culture within a generation or two, but which are only legible to someone who
grew up in the culture to which that money belongs. In Yap this heritage has
been preserved, although diminished in importance; elsewhere it has been
mostly lost.

Hard currency is sufficiently simple to bridge cultural gaps and even gaps
between ages, like pidgin English or Glosa.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years)

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carapace
That book is on my list to read.

One of the most interesting things I've heard about money is what Giordano
Bruno (1548 – 1600) supposedly said: "Whatever has the greatest value and the
least cost of storage becomes money."

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serf
it's a good book, but the earlier chapters regarding tribal economics and the
valued currency being tribal women themselves is questionable from a truth
standpoint.

Tribes traded people for goods and services, sometimes temporarily. It was
mostly a sex and politics thing, but the book views it as a form of currency
bartering and trade; I think there is more nuance there.

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block_dagger
Nano (the cryptocurrency) was originally named Raiblocks after these.

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jacobush
And I can see why "In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and
outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. Although it was
never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it
continued to be transacted as genuine currency".

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stormtv
Interestingly this is the reason why the first Raiblocks wallet was named
canoe. [1]

[1] [https://getcanoe.io/](https://getcanoe.io/)

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DanBC
I find these stones fascinating. You might be interested in this NPR article:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-
island-of-stone-money)

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DoreenMichele
It's a good read with a little more color than the Wikipedia piece.

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DoreenMichele
Humans are wonderfully crazy at times. This really tickled me.

Excerpt (one of the details that delighted me):

 _The extrinsic (perceived) value of a specific stone is based on not only its
size and craftsmanship, but also its history. If many people—or no one at
all—died when the specific stone was transported, or a famous sailor brought
it in, the value of the rai stone increases by reason of its anecdotal heft._

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Gravityloss
Well, there's the stock market.

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DoreenMichele
Not the kind of reply I expected and utterly fails to be a setup for the joke
I wanted to make about not being human myself and just being here on your
planet to do the field study portion of my degree in _Human Studies._

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jackhalford
I believe the Disappointment Islands have one of these [1], in a community of
~40 inhabitants.

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190319-a-journey-to-the-
di...](http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190319-a-journey-to-the-
disappointment-islands)

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yostrovs
Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History by Milton Friedman is a great
read about this and similar topics.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/97822.Money_Mischief](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/97822.Money_Mischief)

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Ice_cream_suit
"Economist Milton Friedman has compared the monetary role of the stone money
to the reserves of gold held in Fort Knox for foreign governments"

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ur-whale
Very few people actually understand money (what it is, how it works), and the
Yap stones are a perfect reminder of that fact.

And unfortunately, the few that do use that knowledge in a profoundly
irresponsible way (e.g. QE)

