1 Introduction
Ladies and gentlemen,
The history of money is a story of its gradual dematerialisation from tangible objects to intangible computer code. For example, there once was a time, on the Pacific island of Yap, when huge and heavy, often doughnut-shaped limestone discs were used as money. That is evidently a very tangible form of money, as you can see in places like the Bundesbank's Money Museum where such a Yap stone is on display. Digital money, by contrast, is intangible. It exists only as binary code.
However, the stone money was a less impractical means of payment than you would imagine. Moreover, the similarities with crypto tokens based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) are so striking that some people wonder whether stone money might have inspired the invention of Bitcoin.
One such similarity is that the creation of new stone discs was constrained. The limestone was carved on the Palauan archipelago, some 400 kilometres away, and shipped to Yap. This made it a very resource-intensive process, not unlike the mining of Bitcoin.