You ever think about what a fucking scam money must have sounded like when people were being introduced to it? Sure, bro. I’ll give you a portion of my harvest in exchange for some Promise Rocks. That seems totally legit.
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I think they were unitary, you couldn't split them. But apparently you could do stuff like lose one on a boat and have that "virtual" stone transfer ownership on the ledger like some kind of physical Bitcoin. Pretty cool.
This worked because what was being exchanged wasn’t the stones themselves but the stone’s history and your right to include yourself in it. I love the stone money so much
Yeah, the thing about money is it's not actually a Stuff Replacement like people assume (and which is also one of the bases for assuming that money has to be preceded by a barter economy)
I can't remember where I read it but there's a school of thought that it started out more as like "these discs with the kings face on it are proof that you've paid tribute to him, so if you can show us you have them after harvest season, the kings men won't stomp you out for skipping taxes"
I think there's been some recent changes in scholarship around this, but I'm nowhere near it - the argument seems to be that this is what gets you *coinage.* *Money* - a unit of account for tracking various debts - I think they now think showed up much earlier.
Apparently one of the earliest things was a tally stick, where they’d mark tallies of how much was being traded in each direction, then break it in half and give one half to each person, so each person had a copy, and if one person tampered with it, they could check to see if it still matched.
Some places went through periods where they would trade certain small valuable things so much, like shells and knives, that they just switched over to miniature fake versions. Because at a certain point they were like “no one’s actually going to use this knife, they’re just passing it around”.
I suppose I can kind of make sense of it as evolving from cases where the trade can't be immediate: You're grazing your sheep _now,_ you have wool to trade here, you want the grain that will be ready after the harvest.
Not hard to imagine stories where you need ag futures early on.
I think people also operated more on something sort of like favors and gifts, but with an understanding of favors and gifts balancing out down the line, and needed to keep track of it
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Miller in Mesopotamia "if you want milled grain you give me the grain and i give you a chit for a bag of milled grain"
Dude in mesopotamia "sweet i have 5 chits I only need 4. Hey! Jake! You want to give me that chicken for a chit? Yeah! A whole bag!"
And thus, money was born
And the metals did have uses in jewelry and cookware (particularly copper and silver)
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180502-the-tiny-island-with-human-sized-money
Which is neat! Banks predating coins.
Not hard to imagine stories where you need ag futures early on.