What do you think of this fact?
Take a walk on Yap in the western Pacific and you’ll pass large round stone discs with a hole in the middle. They aren’t decorations. They’re money.
Money you can roll
The stone discs are called rai. The smallest are just a few centimeters across. According to the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the biggest are about 3.6 meters (12 feet) in diameter, almost half a meter thick and weigh about 4 tons.
The limestone doesn’t even come from Yap. It was quarried on Palau, about 450 kilometers (280 miles) away, and brought across the sea on rafts. So a stone’s value depends not just on its size but also on how hard it was to get and on its history.
Paying without moving
The most amazing part is how paying works. If someone receives a big stone as payment, nobody rolls it through the village. It stays where it is. Only the ownership changes, and people simply know who owns which stone.
So the money works like a shared memory. That’s actually not so different from modern money, which often exists only as an entry in an account.
Bonus fact: Typhoons sank some of the rafts carrying stones. Divers have found many of these discs on the seabed around the islands.
In the 1930s, the Japanese counted over 13,000 stone discs. Typhoons, floods and World War II, when stones were used as anchors and building material, have cut that number roughly in half. For everyday purchases, people on Yap now use US dollars. For big occasions like dowries or land deals, the stone money still comes out.
A fortune nobody can steal, because nobody can carry it off. That’s one way to do security.