Shell Money and Bitcoin

Shell Money is the use of sea shells as way of exchange, serving the purpose as the modern money that we have today. It is known to have been used across continents - America, Asia, Africa and Australia. But how can something as commonly available as a sea shell used as currency?

Well, in olden times, the mode of transportations were not so well developed. Many people living away from the coasts - in the middle of the mainland would not ever see a coast in their lives! ; sea shells were a rarity. Moreover, the process of finding the shells and then grounding them to required size and shape was laboriuos. Since the process was difficult, the value of the currency was maintained. This is called a Proof Of Work System.

A Proof of Work is a piece of data that is

• costly (time consuming / space consuming) to produce
• satisfies certain requirements
• easy for others to verify.

The difficulty of the manual process of creating the shell money is the Proof of Work, which helps maintain its value. This is remarkably similar to Proof of Work System that is the basis of Bitcoin Mining. Bitcoin uses the HashCash proof of work algorithm which satisfies all the three properties that I mentioned earlier. In fact, it has been used to prevent DoS attacks and Email Spams.

Crazy how this idea was used 10 thousand years ago with the Sea Shell Currency!

Trivia: Some provinces of Solomon Islands still use shell money today, primarily for ceremonies, settling disputes, and bridal and land payments.