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ChristianKl comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong
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Somebody should explore if Stonehenge, Carnac stones, and other megalithic formations were banking and payment systems.
More recently, in the isle of Yap, they used big Rai stones as money.
Many megalithic buildings are tombs, places of worship, or served as calendars, but many big stones aligned in open spaces have no conclusive explanation.
I suggest they could have been a way of storing value and were used for payments too. There is evidence that there was trade across the European continent and into the middle east in those times (~6000 BC). Central marketplaces where they raised the stones and met to trade could have been a use case. The stones obviously stayed there, with a consensus of who owned them, and the next season of trade they would use them as money again.
To move huge stones and align them takes a lot of time and effort, but greed may be a strong incentive to have built those formations.
Good money is easy to transfer. Those huge stones aren't easy to transfer.
I agree that is a good quality of modern money, but there were other models before.
For example in the island of Yap, there are huge Rai stones that are static and the people just agreed who owned each stone when they traded. They achieved consensus by trading and changing ownership with witnesses or in public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
The above public consensus system makes the stones transferable, very much like the tones of gold that are stored in the bank of England and The Fed in NY. They are not actually moved, but change owners all the time by using a certificate system.
They could have little tokens that represent the stones, and pass those around as symbols of ownership. And then the druids in charge of the stones might think, how many people ever check up on their stones anyway? We can create new tokens whenever we want to buy stuff! And when that goes too far and there are runs on the megalith banks, they might have to go off the megalith standard and just pass the tokens around.
How do you stop counterfighting of the stones?
Um...religious taboo.
I'm not being serious here, just nailing the original crazy idea to the wall and seeing what confabulations accrete round it.
This is why I posted in the crazy ideas thread!
I don't know how they could have made the bigger stones represented by tokens. Nevertheless, the stones didn't have to be divisible or transferable to be used as store of value and trade.
The places where there happen to be thousands of stones aligned in the same place, like Carnac, could have been big annual markets where they traded goods, lands, political agreements, slaves, wives, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnac_stones