Needs a Title

Ever played a board game? I’m sure you have. Most board games you play have sort of valuable or collectable items. Take a game like monopoly, I know a lot of us have played this game before. The objective of this game is to be the “richest” which is done by owning the most properties and having the most money while running everyone else bankrupt. The one thing you need in that game to succeed is money. Without money you cannot do very much, and this applies to a lot in life. Money has always been around us, in so many forms, and even in no form at all. Ever hear of stone money? I’m going to tell you about a little island in the pacific called Yap with a very interesting form of currency and how it relates so much to money nowadays (The Island of Stone Money).

The Island of Yap is a very small island located in the Pacific Ocean and is very well known for its ‘Stone Money’ (423: The Invention of Money). The people of this island had a very interesting way to approach their own form of currency hundred of years ago, and what they used were limestone discs, and these discs came in very many sizes, some even being bigger than cars; and these limestone discs were not found on the island of yap, but an “island with limestone caves about 250 miles away” (423: The Invention of Money)! The people of this island named these limestone discs “Fei” and the bigger the disc, the more value it had; Of course, having giant stone discs was a bit of an issue so instead of relocating them every time they transferred ownership, they would just claim them where they sat; which basically meant that if someone had a disc on a hill faraway, and I traded my house for this disc, only the ownership would transfer and now everyone would know that it now belongs to me. There was a story about how when the workers were returning with the giant discs from the far away limestone caves, they ran into a storm right outside the island and ended up cutting the Fei lose and losing it to the ocean (Friedman). When they got back to the island, they told everyone about this occurrence and believe it or not, the people of Yap decided that it was fine, and it could still be used! This meant that even though no one has seen this stone is hundreds of years, it still had value, and someone still has ownership over it (Friedman)!

This brings up a great point, because as much as we think “these people are crazy for thinking that you could just transfer ownership of your money without even handing someone something or giving them proof of ownership” well you might as well call yourself crazy as well, we do this all the time. In fact, this is how all our credit/debit cards work! There are no hand-to-hand transactions, it’s all just binary digits at the end of the day. Your money could be anywhere, but instead it’s a bunch of random numbers on the internet; just like your Fei could be anywhere, but you are the one who owns it! This is also seen commonly on many digital platforms. We can send “real” money with the touch of a button, and we can even own virtual currency! You can also exchange real currency for fake currency such as coins in video games. Of course, these currencies are not technically real or physical objects. But they have a certain worth to people and at the end of the day it’s the same principle as the Fei, it’s more of an idea than a real thing. ” As time has passed however, developers have greatly expanded on the initial idea to the point where the economies found within games are often just as complex as those found across the globe.” (Bowen)

Speaking of around the globe, did you know when the German Government purchased The Caroline Islands (Which Yap is a part of) from Spain in 1898, many of the paths were in terrible condition and “the chiefs of the several districts were told that they must have them restored to good working order” (Milton). But the “roughly dressed blocks of coral” (Milton) were quite suitable for the natives of the island. However, the Germans did not like that, and they decided to punish the Natives by painting a certain number of Fei with a black cross to signify that the money was being claimed by the German government. This was done to scare the People of Yap into fixing these ‘roads’ in order to get their Fei back. This was successful and roads were built on the island to connect everything and once the job was finished the German Government sent agents out to erase the black crosses from the Fei. (Milton)

The concept of Stone Money is a very interesting concept to me. The fact that the people of the Island of Yap were able to just place these limestone discs anywhere and still know how to claim them and use them for trade still blows my mind. One of my favorite parts is how I felt that these people were crazy but once I investigated it, I was able to relate almost everything that we do today with money to the ways that they did back then. But something that really blows my mind is how the Yap decided to use a piece of Fei that was lost to the ocean during the storm, as a valid form of currency even though for all we know, these guys could have lied to everyone to scam them out of their belongings. But either way it became a real form of currency that they trust, just like how we trust all these virtual currencies that don’t truly exist and have almost zero real life value. This little island seemed to just coincidentally make us realize that we all believe in many forms of currency, real or not, and how we put value to things. The people of Yap made me realize so much about our economy and how we believe in these currencies that we have made and how far it has come.

References

“423: The Invention of Money.” This American Life, NPR, 14 Dec. 2017, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/423/transcript.

Bowen, Tom. “10 Video Game Currencies and Their Real World Values.” Game Rant, Game Rant, 1 Oct. 2020, gamerant.com/video-game-currency-real-world-value/.

Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” StoneMoneyEssay.Pdf, The Hoover Institution Stanford University, Feb. 1991, counterintuitive2015.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/stonemoneyessay.pdf.

“The Island of Stone Money.” NPR, NPR, 10 Dec. 2010, http://www.npr.org/transcripts/131934618.