History’s First Public Ledger System
Another example of how something that is often portrayed and perceived as primitve in the contemporary West, was, in reality, hundreds of years ahead of its time.
You probably haven’t heard of Yap, Micronesia.
To be honest, I didn’t either until a volunteer teaching job took me there in 2014, nearly 2 weeks after I graduated from college. It was Mid-December, just 3 days after Christmas, and I was ready to make a 8,000 journey in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Why not move away to a tropical island?
I lived on the island-state of Yap for nearly two years. It’s 39 square miles. And it gets really, really humid.
While there, I did normal things that Yapese do. Spear-fished with rods made out of bamboo, ate fruit bat, and drank fermented coconut water into the night.
But that’s not why I’m writing to you about Yap today.
I’m here to talk about Yapese money. Stone money or Rai, as we call it in Wa’ab (Wa’ab being the Yapese word for Yap).
What is Stone money?
The short answer is limestone. However, the more correct answer would have to include something about value because after all, it is a currency.
Hundreds of years ago, Yapese voyagers rowed outrigger canoes about 300 miles to Palau for large limestone deposits… then they rowed that same canoe back 300 more miles, except on the way back, the outrigger had a one-ton rock on it that could weigh more than a car.
Easy.
Especially when you have the stars to guide you.
In order to attain stone money, navigators would trade beads and shells to Palau.
This process would take up from 6 months up to a year. This should make the node verification process seem like a cake walk.
Imagine waiting 6 months for currency that has a chance of falling into the ocean as it makes its way back to you.
These ancient navigators used the stars as their compass on their way to find Palau, a tradition still taught to traditional Yapese navigators today.
Traditional Yapese Navigators also used dolphins to assure them they were sailing in the right direction. Three dolphins swimming together was a good sign, so navigators would have the three dolphins traditionally tattooed with a turtle shell needle and local wood as a hammer. Today’s tattoo culture would call that tapping.
Tapping was banned in Yap during the Japanese occupation before WWII (at that time in Japan, tattoos were associated with criminals).
The tapping technique was lost for almost 96 years until my Yapese adopted brother Leo revived the tradition after reading a book written by a German anthropologist.
At the time of the publication in the early 1900s, the writer was in his mid-twenties and worked as an anthropologist on Yap during German’s colonial occupation before the WWI.
From reading the book, Leo had the tools carved by his cousin, and preformed the first Yapese Traditional Tattoo in 96 years… on my leg.
Going back to blockchain, the value of the stone money was actually derived from the long journey, as well as the size and weight of the deposit.
Later on, value was also added to the stone money if it was known to have arrived on the island before the era of the famous Irish explorer, David O’Keefe, who came to Yap during the mid to late 19th century, marrying two wives to add to the wife and daughter he had back in the USA.
Stone Money is still used in Yap today alongside the US Dollar.
One instance you could use the stone for would be for your daughter’s dowry. You may give this Stone ceremonially to the other family along with some shell money as a sign of peace and respect at the local wedding ceremony.
Respect is one of the biggest, if not the biggest pillar in Yapese culture, and Rai is one of the most visible signs of the respect that the island cherishes.
Other stones are used to represent the value of a piece of land or property, which is arguably the stone’s most important use.
In Yapese culture, the land that you live on is what gives you your official title and ranking within the caste system.
Stone Money as a Public Ledger.
Stone money comes with the land, a system dating back until the time the ancient navigator’s placed it on their chief’s property. The stone money acts as a visual representation of your social cache and rank within the hierarchy of Yapese society.
The stones are hardly ever moved as they are fragile and obviously very old. But what happens when one stone is given away? It will remain on the previous owner’s land even after it passes into possession of another owner.
Legend has it that there is a stone that is in the middle of the ocean because it was dropped by one of the ancient Yapese navigators as it was brought over after being quarried.
The owner of the Stone has passed down the rights of ownership from one generation to the next, up until the present day. If you go to Yap today, you will be able to find out who that stones belongs to despite the owner, nor his father, nor grandfather, ever having seen it. The stone stills lies at the bottom of the Yap Trench.
But the reason why these stones can teach us so much about blockchain is the public accountability of ownership for each stone that is known throughout the island.
If you have the right to a Stone, everyone knows it via oral history. As far as I’ve been made away through my research, this is the first public ledger.
In fact, as one Yapese man said in an interview with Quartz last October, “the more people who know (about the transaction), the more secure that transaction then becomes.”
The same systemic applies to blockchain, too. Instead of a record being kept in one central place like a bank or a master registry, records of previous transactions are kept on a decentralized database all across the world. Similarly, knowledge of who owns a stone does not rest in the hands of some third part intermediary, though someone outside of the two people involved (or perhaps a node) in a transaction strengthen the credibility of the transaction.
Without the public ledger and blockchain, there would not be a Bitcoin. Similarly, without the public ledger of oral communication within Yapese culture, the system Rai stones have been transacted on would no longer exist.
Milton Friedman wrote a paper on this in 1991 for Standford University. In the paper, Friedman brilliantly compares stone money to an incident that happened between the United States and France in the early 1930s.
Out of fear that the United States would not honor the standard of about $20.00 for the price of gold, the Bank of France called upon the New York Federal Reserve to convert dollar assets into gold.
However, the US didn’t ship the gold across the ocean.
Instead, the Bank of France asked for the gold to be stored in the Bank of France’s account, so the NY Federal Reserve simply put the gold ingots into a separate drawer and labeled it.
The Bank of France’s decision led the NY Federal Reserve to believe they had a weaker monetary position! This goes back to what I was saying before about stone money being given to another person but the stone staying on the previous owner’s land.
In the paper, Friedman compared the incident with Bank of France’s gold to the German Occupation of Yap during which the Germans put black paint on the stone money to identify if it had already been used for a purchase or to pay taxes. When a black mark was made, the owner of the stone then had a tangible identifier indicating that they did not have as much money as they had before.
While Friedman argued that this was a matter of myth and that the value of money was misunderstood, some argue that Friedman’s conclusion was wrong, and the Yapese understood money far better than anyone of their time (and perhaps even our time, too).
Stone Money existed as a duality, especially before the German occupation happened. It was both an item to be used for collateral, as well as a measure for prices. However, as the Germans allowed them to use the stone money for tithe, the value of the stone money continued to inflate. The harder they worked for the Germans, the more stone money they seemingly had to put forth to pay their dues.
This caused a snowball effect of inflation as well as the breakdown of the public ledger that the Yapese had been using to keep track of who owned which Rai.
This goes to show what can happen once public accountability is gone. However, blockchain technology makes transactions public knowledge. The public ledger is so intertwined with the ongoing system of Bitcoin that the public ledger is consulted in the verification process through which all Bitcoin must pass before they change hands.
My dream is to blog full time. If you loved what you read my ETH wallet loves donations: 0xac48c872d99f8d2c5cace6ee57cedc9e2019f99d
BountBase is a virtual currency marketer & content creator that connects coin development teams with the larger blockchain community. You can follow us on Twitter @BountyBase
Contact the author at Andrew.Mailen2@gmail.com
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