People have trusted shells, stones, paper promises and code. Walk through the rooms and see what each one solved, and what it broke.
Every one of these was money once.
Read the label, check the source, then follow the money.
Tap a room. The path runs from the oldest idea to the newest.
1Room 1 · Money from the Sea
Cowrie shell
China · about 1600–1000 BC · Shell, 17 mm
Small enough to count, hard to fake, and only found far away by the sea. Cowries passed as money across Africa and Asia for centuries. In Chinese writing, the shell still sits inside the characters for money, buy and value.
Ask yourself Why would a shell from a faraway sea be worth more inland?
Yap, Micronesia · quarried for centuries; the last one arrived in 1931 · Limestone from Palau, about 280 miles away
Carved on another island and carried home across open ocean. The biggest are 12 feet across and weigh 8,800 pounds, so they stayed put. When one changed hands, everyone just knew who owned it now. The island's memory was the ledger.
Ask yourself If nobody moves the stone, what actually changes hands?
United States · authorized 1863, first issued Nov. 1865; recalled 1933 · Paper, a receipt for gold
A receipt: gold sat at the Treasury and the paper said so. Then on April 5, 1933, an executive order told Americans to hand in their gold coins and gold certificates for ordinary paper dollars. By January 1934, no U.S. currency could be turned in for gold.
Ask yourself What is a receipt worth when the one holding the gold changes the rules?
The biggest number ever printed on a banknote. At the peak, in November 2008, prices rose an estimated 79.6 billion percent in a single month. The zeros weren't the problem. They were the receipt for it.
Ask yourself Who noticed first: the people holding the notes, or the people printing them?
Sold worldwide · first sold 2014 (maker's own history) · Plastic, a chip, a screen
It doesn't hold any bitcoin. It holds the private keys that prove the bitcoin on the network is yours, and it keeps them off your phone and laptop. Lose the device and the seed phrase, and nobody can give it back. No bank, no recall order.
Ask yourself Is money you hold yourself freer, or just more your responsibility?
