@Mark

I was glad to help. I would however like to clarify Stan's analogy to today's financial systems; the cowrie shells' best analog is gold bars, rather than currency. Currency in its true form eg shilling is simply a representation of some wealth. It should ideally cost nothing to make (eg print cash or mint coin). This makes plastic money the most efficient form of currency today.

Gold, however, has a long and expensive process to be realized. It is universally accepted as rare and valuable. It can be used to 'really show' how wealthy a person or a country is (ie for them to acquire 1 ton of pure gold) and is thus declared 'hard'.

As money, however, gold can be quite useless because it is hard to tinker with its value (eg how many milligrams of gold dust would buy a piece of roast maize? How would the maize vendor measure these milligrams? etc)


Davis