The first time I heard about stone money I imagined people pushing around huge stones to trade, and I just imagined how the rich in their community must have a bunch of stones lying around multiple homes, and how some people did not have the stone money. I thought it was a funny concept but the more I thought about it the more I thought how similar Stone money was to our currency. 

Money is fluid and only really has value because we say it does. If it fails, a dollar will turn out to be just a piece of paper. It is something that you can constantly change over and over but only actually really makes sense if we are exchanging it for something. An online currency is just like that, it only really makes sense because someone decided to invest in it and exchanged it for something else. They had to believe it actually had value, and it did. So in that case even though money changes constantly in different forms it still has the same value because they believed in it. But, we actually do need it to be able to have an easy way of exchanging things and to live. Since we have the concept of money, it is important that we have it because it helps people survive. We are able to exchange it for food and other necessities for a human to have. 

It is in different forms but they both have the same value to both the people or parties involved exchanging. It is like in the podcast the island of stone money when the 3 Big Stone that was on the boat that was in the ocean and when they were exchanging it they had to rely on the fact that it was there and had to believe that it actually existed. It wasn’t in their faces but they still believed that it was there. It’s like the same thing in the United States, it’s like it’s like when you go to the bank with a check that you have and even if the bank does not have the $1,000 that you deposit into your account you have money in your bank account you don’t physically see it but you know it’s there. And that’s the same thing with any online currency that you use over and over. You are only seeing numbers, and if you have cash you are only seeing paper. You have to believe it has actual value for it to have value.

Since the concept of money is constantly changing it’s like the essay about Bitcoin and the new currency 4 and how the author talks about the fact that your Bitcoin money is only worth something if someone wants to actually buy it. The Bitcoin money is stored in a hard drive in a “virtual wallet”. Even though you can’t physically hold the currency it still has value to the people buying and selling it. Bitcoin is a perfect example of money changing forms and still technically having the same value. Bitcoin is only the new currency because people believe it is the new currency. People are only investing in it making it have a real value quotation because they want it to. Is inevitable for money to not have different forms because money is fluid and the concept of money is constantly changing and it’s never going to stay the same, but it is going to have the same value. It is like in this American life when the speaker explains that when you pay your bills online, you do not have to see it to know that you paid it, it’s just information. He mentions that you are not getting a bunch of hundred dollar bills every week. Because you aren’t. You are just getting a bunch of information that is told to you that is saying this is money and you can spend it, and you do only because you and the person exchanging it believe you can. 

The credit cards we use right now only have actual value because we say they do. Just because it is said that it is there does not mean that it is actually there. 1 Jacob Goldstein talks about this and mentions how money doesn’t really exist, and most of the money that actually exists is just an idea. It is only decided that it was an actual way to exchange things, because it is something that we humans needed. So, if you think about it, the concept of exchanging stones for different things is not absurd because it is basically what we do in America, but in a different way. The stone only has no value to you as an American because that is not your form of currency, but it will to the person exchanging it because that is their money. You can change the form of it to something like a flower, but it still is going to have value if you start exchanging it. 

The concept of money is needed to survive and without it, how will we be able to change things to make a living and survive. It’s like the story about how 1 Ira Glass says that the lie that saved Brazil was that everybody started believing in their currency and they all panicked because they had nothing to trade. Without the belief that there is a currency you cannot trade anything and this makes a huge panic within communities and people are scared because when they believed in it it was easy for them to be able to trade. Even though it might not be there in your face you still believe that it’s there and therefore it is there and you can use it and that’s what makes it so important. But the problem is when you don’t have enough of it and you say that you have enough of it that’s when you have problems like inflation and it is detrimental to communities who are relying on it.

References

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/423/transcript

2. https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/215061/full

3.https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-island-of-stone-money

4https://sg.news.yahoo.com/bubble-bursts-e-currency-bitcoin-064913387–finance.html