Once upon a time there was a society and their money was rock.
Like the flintstones their assets were stone. This doesn’t sound like a great idea until you think of Gold, which might as well be a stone to primitive people and was discovered in rivers like stones. Gold is and was just a bit more funky than your everyday rock. It malleable, its shiny, it looks nice on you.
Rock money is not such a bad idea. Diamonds are nice rocks, they look good on you too.
You need to spend a lot of effort to get a diamond and a lot to encase it in half an ounce of Gold. That is why it is so expensive after all, so desirable.
This society however didn’t have gold or diamonds or emeralds or even pearls. They used rocks as money. Round grey rocks. For good measure the rocks had round holes drilled in them to make them easier to carry on poles.
From other societies some people thought this was because they were millstones, but they probably weren’t. No one used the rock money to grind food, they used it as a store of wealth.
You send people off to bring you these big rocks and when they got back that effort was enshrined in the rock and if you wanted it you needed to swap something of equal calorific value.
These stones were the societies key asset, round rocks cut out of limestone with a hole in the middle brought from far away. Across the waters it would have been small rhomboidal clear rocks shined up, or even oyster grit covered in white shell, but in this society it was round grey rocks, flat like a coin, heavy as possible with a hole in the middle to help get it from A to B.
It was good money because the society in question didn’t have any rock where they were, and rocks needed to be quarried far away and brought to them across the sea. Rock was rare and the job dangerous.
Rocks were valuable based on the difficulty of getting them which was a function of size and weight, like Gold. Like Diamonds quality and reputation came into play too. If a rock had a brand attached to it, for example a famous person owned it or came by it, it would be worth more than a rock poorly fashioned and brought into the society by a nobody.
This is all true.
As you might have guessed this was not an advanced civilisation and while the big rocks were big money they were somewhat inconvenient, especially as they were very heavy, so that no one could be bothered to move them.
Fortunately, the owners of these giant coins kept track of who owned which and they were left were they sat. The owner made sure everyone knew it was their asset rock and as no one could move it, so ownership was maintained. Even if a rock was sunk on its way to the society everyone knew where it was and who it belonged too, so that counted as an asset too. It might be an intangible rock but it was clearly very close to where it fell overboard, so it remained real.
Now assets that have value because of the effort put in to create them might seem a strange thing but somehow it is very suddenly a familiar idea. Assets that sit stationary while their ownership changes, might seem weird but like something very modern too.
Assets that are worth a lot because everyone agrees they have a value, seem ridiculous when clearly money must have a ‘real intrinsic value’ like eh, Gold.
These value fundamentals have been forgotten in the modern era of the ‘fiat’ currency printing press and money generation dynamics of fractional banking.
This Rock money lasted for 1000 years.
Rai stones still sit around the islands of Micronesia today.
So what happened to this Lapis-currency?
The Europeans showed up and gave the society the tools to make money bigger and faster. They of course did and the stone money got inflated, collapsed as meaningful and went out of circulation.
It happened to Wampum too.
Yet unlike Wampum, the stones are still occasionally exchanged, just like gold coins are today.
So today the Marshall Islands, another Micronesian society wants to introduce a Cryptocurrency.
It is called the Sovereign. The IMF doesn’t like it, somehow this might do terrible things to the world and more specifically The Marshall Island.
Paper money is better than rock money, is better than metal money.
We know all know this, don’t we?