Experiments · Nobody Owns Money · Chapter 1
The stones of Yap: money that never moves
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About this experiment
On the Pacific island of Yap people long paid with stone wheels cut from limestone on Palau. The biggest were taller than a man, and nobody carried them anywhere. When a stone passed to a new owner it stayed put, and the whole island remembered that it now belonged to another family.
A family near the village of Dulukan was counted rich although its main stone lay on the sea floor, sunk by a storm on the way from Palau. The German administration made the chiefs repair the roads by painting marks on their stones, and not one stone moved. In the 1870s Captain David O’Keefe began carrying islanders to Palau on his ship; there were more stones after that, and the ones brought in a ship’s hold were valued below those cut the old way.
Crypto evangelists call Yap the first blockchain. Researchers of the island’s culture dispute it: the stones were used for weddings, apologies and alliances, and nobody took them to the shop. What Yap does show is that money can be a record everyone recognises, and that it is worth what it costs to fake.
From the book
Nobody Owns Money · Chapter 1
A Stone at the Bottom of the Sea
A hundred and thirty years before Satoshi, the people of Yap discovered what programmers would later call proof of work. A record is worth as much as it costs to forge, and when extraction gets cheaper, the money gets cheaper too. Bitcoin would solve this problem automatically, raising the mining difficulty every two weeks so that new iron tools simply cannot exist. O’Keefe got rich, Hollywood made a film about him with Burt Lancaster called His Majesty O’Keefe, and in 1901 he vanished at sea along with his schooner, and where it lies nobody knows, just like the stone of the Dulukan family.