Greetings to the community, I have decided to honor my first post to the amazing Blockchain technology by sharing an interesting historical fact I learned in my Course “Blockchain Disruption” at Coursera and certified by the Austral University from Argentina.
Did you know that there was already a form of human Blockchain system in 500 DC?
During my course, reading a little bit about history of money, or forms of money, I learned that there is an Island in Oceania (Micronesia) that used to have the name of Yap island, where the indigenous people, the Yapis, had a monetary system based on big stones.
The stone you see in the picture, was their money, the RAI stone. Big and heavy stones with a hole in the middle.
Big and heavy stones with a hole in the middle meant to insert a stick or piece of wood to be able to transport it. Many of these stones were originally mined there, and because they were very heavy, they decided to keep the stones where they were and keep a record of their location.
It turns out that the Yapis created their own monetary system, using their stones as their medium of exchange and their memories as their unique distributed ledger to keep accountability of transactions between them.
Since the stones were too heavy, there was no need to move them within the island, so the Yapis kept a mental record of their locations, same as a mental record of the transactions between all of them. This is considered nowadays as their form of Distributed Ledger, or Blockchain. Every Yapi had a mental record of each coin (stone). Every Time there was a transaction, they had to come together and update their mental record. So it was distributed, all transactions were known by all the tribe. In this model, it was hard to claim a stone (coin) just because, since everyone in the community had a mental updated data of who the last owner of each stone was. Isn’t this incredible?
In the course, there is an important mention about an author, William Henry Furness III who spent some time in the island back in the early 1900s and wrote a book called “The Island Of Stone Money” in which he explains how impressed he was by their monetary system. I have not read the book yet, I hope I will find it online.
To conclude this short story, I think it’s amazing that centuries before Satoshi Nakamoto brought the Blockchain, there was already an antique trybe applying some of the fundamentals of Bitcoin in their monetary system: censorship resistance, immutable, distributed accounting book, no need of third party, and most importantly the unhackable monetary system. And interesting enough, they are still using this system honoring their customs.
I am glad to share this short historical fact. If you knew about the Yap Island and their monetary system and maybe know of a similar system throughout history, please comment below. If not and you liked what you have learned, please let me know what you think.
It was a pleasure to start my first HIVE blog post honoring Blockchain with a bit of interesting history.
Sharing this post in my twitter account to bring attention to Hive! / My Tweet
Info Sources:
Image Source:
