> 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.
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.
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.
....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.
Also barter was never really a thing:
However, ethnographic studies have shown that no present or past society has used barter without any other medium of exchange or measurement, nor have anthropologists found evidence that money emerged from barter, instead finding that gift-giving (credit extended on a personal basis with an inter-personal balance maintained over the long term) was the most usual means of exchange of goods and services
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.
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."
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.
Honestly, with all that oral history thing, it sounds like a proto-blockchain. The "true chain" in any given situation is determined by the set of oral histories that everyone can agree on.
"in the case of stones that are too large to move", yes. Other stones are smaller, mentioned at sizes of 3.5 or 2.8-3.1cm each, an easy size to carry. Not knowing much about the area they were used in, I'd say the quantity (6000 or so according to the article) is more limiting.
It's not totally clear from the article, but it would seem that the small coins are worth much less than the large ones since there is little hardship involved in their excavation and transportation. So the small ones function more like coins, and the large ones are more like valuable property which can be exchanged via an oral deed.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.