What is money? For these island people, it was enormous donut stones.
Tucked away in the farthest corners of the South Pacific is a tiny island called Yap. For centuries, these pre-industrial people used a unique system of currency. These enormous, utterly impractical, and counter-intuitive stone sculptures in the shape of coins were used as money. They were used for big purchases like a dowry, or as payment to another village if you wanted to, let’s say, retrieve the body of a warrior fallen in battle.
Moving them around was obviously an enormous task, and so, they developed this unique financial invention. Stones never actually had to move and instead would have owners. Even weirder, the stones weren’t made on the island. Instead, tribesmen would row out in tiny bamboo boats to islands hundreds of miles away to carve them and bring them back to Yap.
This whole system seems ridiculous, but what is money? This is one of the most stoner questions on the planet but think about it. After all, we used to carry around these heavy pieces of gold. Then we decided to switch to pieces of paper that represented gold in a bank. You could take that paper to the bank and take out pieces of gold. Then countries like the USA decided, in 1933, that you could no longer use paper to take out gold from a bank. Instead, these pieces of paper would represent the idea of money.
Article by Nicholas Graham Platt
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
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