A few centuries ago, in an island group called Micronesia in the Western Pacific, the islanders of Yap Island began to go to the nearby Paros Island to beat the limestone on the island into a stone with a hollow inside and a ring around the outside. wheel, and then rafted back to Yap to be used as currency called rai (stone money).
In the history of currency, rai is a representative of credit currency and has been mentioned repeatedly in various records. Or even a travel blogger visiting the local area. But few people think about how similar it is to Bitcoin, and even the idea of Bitcoin comes from it.
Recently, a man namedArchaeologist Scott Fitzpatrick proposed just such a conjecture: These RAIs are the predecessors of Bitcoin and blockchain technology.
Fitzpatrick elaborates on this argument:
First, both rai and bitcoin are participants equally maintaining this infrastructure. Because of its bulky size and inconvenient transportation, rai is mostly placed in a fixed location for common maintenance.
Secondly, the transfer process of rai is consensus, continuous bookkeeping and open auditing. If the two parties reach a deal, they only need to mark on the stone held by the buyer that the stone now belongs to the seller.
This consensus is very strong and has not been broken through generations. Babbitt founder Chang Jia told such a story in his book about blockchain:
There is a rich family on the island. Everyone admits that their family is the richest man, but the strange thing is that no one has seen the stone coins in the richest mans house, not even his family members. The property owned by their family is a huge stone coin, but this stone coin has been buried under the sea for decades.
It turned out that many years ago, the ancestors of this family and others went out to mine limestone. Their ancestors were lucky enough to encounter this behemoth, and they made stone coins out of it, and then pulled them home on a raft. But on the way home, there was a strong storm. In order to escape for their lives, the expedition team had to cut off the rope pulling the raft, so the huge stone coin sank into the sea and could never be found.
After returning to the village, members of the expedition team all testified for him that the stone coin was huge in size and of high quality. Although it has fallen into the sea, everyone has witnessed the whereabouts of this stone, so its value will not be affected. Its owner can still use it to buy things, just like sending the stone coin home for storage.
But such a consensus and security cannot support a large-scale network after all. Fortunately, Satoshi Nakamoto brought us encrypted digital credit currency.
