But just because you don't know the utility of a thing does not mean there was none. So, you are making an assumption, that Rai stones had no use. It could have been the very difference between life and death. In such world knowledge of history could be the most useful thing there is. You don't live in a world with fewer people than you have now, in another time and place, with different ideals and values. It is very possible that knowledge of history was far more important and useful in some other cultures. What you cannot know is the utility of history throughout all human civilization. I don't think they do it for kicks and giggles. Can you dispute this? Would you claim that knowledge of history is not useful? Even in your present day context and westernized culture, where knowledge of history may have been deprioritized, some people even today in your world still devote a great deal of time to pursuing knowledge of history. History can be extraordinarily useful to know. Why not? (I think because you haven't disproven it.) I.e., you haven't said the statement is disproven. I noticed you said "This isn't necessarily true," instead of "This isn't true." In other words, you are saying it might be untrue. In order to function as a medium of exchange, a token must do at least a reasonable job of holding (i.e. Conversely, it also doesn't make sense for something to be only a medium of exchange. The entire purpose of storing value is to eventually access that value via a subsequent exchange. Thus, the shared memory / oral history that kept tabs of ownership wasn't really a "layer 2" - it was effectively the real monetary base.ĮDIT: more fundamentally consider why "store of value" can't be a use case by itself. So in essence, what you might assume to have been the base layer (physical transfer of the stones) was so horrifically inefficient that it essentially didn't exist and wasn't the real money proper. What is important is that ownership of the rai is clear to everyone, not that the rai is physically transferred or even physically accessible to either party in the transfer. Although it was never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it continued to be transacted as genuine currency. In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. The names of previous owners are passed down to the new one. The physical location of the stone may not matter-though the ownership of a particular stone changes, the stone itself is rarely moved due to its weight and risk of damage. Rai stones fly in the face of this seeming truth.
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