AMF ADVISORS BLOG
The Weird History of Money
Long before dollars and cents, people paid each other in squirrel pelts, giant stone discs, and notched sticks of wood. Here’s a tour through the strangest currencies in history — and the myths that get told about them.
Money only needs to do a few things: be scarce enough to hold value, portable (or at least trackable) enough to trade, and trusted enough that the next person will accept it too. Almost anything can qualify if a community agrees on it — which is how societies have ended up paying each other in shells, beans, pelts, and slabs of stone weighing more than a car. Here are eight of the strangest currencies ever used, and one very old myth about money that turns out not to be true.
1. Money So Big You Never Actually Moved It
On the Micronesian island of Yap, wealth took the form of rai: giant carved limestone discs, some barely bigger than a coin, others the size of a car and far too heavy to lift. The stones were quarried on a neighboring island and paddled roughly 250 miles back to Yap by canoe — a journey that itself proved the stone’s value. Ownership changed hands the way a bank transfer works today: everyone in the community simply agreed and remembered who owned which stone. The heaviest ones never moved again after they arrived; only the record of who owned them did.
2. The Wooden Sticks That Ran the Royal Treasury
For roughly 700 years, England’s royal Exchequer recorded debts on tally sticks: notched pieces of hazelwood, split lengthwise so the lender and the borrower each kept a matching half. The notches marked the amount, and the wood’s natural, irregular grain made it nearly impossible to forge a matching piece. The system finally stopped in 1826 — but the story doesn’t end there.
In 1834, clerks decided to burn the centuries of accumulated old tally sticks in two furnaces underneath the House of Lords. The fire got out of control, spread into the wall paneling, and burned down the old Palace of Westminster. The building that replaced it is the Houses of Parliament standing in London today — meaning the UK’s current seat of government exists, in a roundabout way, because of a bookkeeping cleanup that went badly wrong.
3. Shells That Crossed Oceans as Cash
Small, durable, and naturally hard to counterfeit, cowrie shells — mostly harvested in the Maldives — circulated as currency across West Africa, parts of Asia, and the Pacific for centuries. They were portable and came in fairly consistent sizes, which made them practical for everyday small purchases in a way that bulkier forms of money weren’t. King Gezo of Dahomey (in what’s now Benin) reportedly preferred them to gold because their supply was steady enough to guarantee people a fair, predictable price. It’s worth noting a darker chapter too: cowries also became a standard unit of exchange in the transatlantic slave trade, a reminder that currency history isn’t only a fun trivia story.
4. A Real Economy, Built Entirely on Cigarettes
Economist R.A. Radford spent part of World War II as a prisoner of war — and instead of just enduring it, he documented the market economy that spontaneously formed inside the camp. Cigarettes became the currency: prices for jam, razor blades, and bread fluctuated with supply (a new Red Cross parcel shipment was effectively inflation), arbitrage kept prices consistent across the camp, and traders even developed a futures market for bread ahead of the weekly ration. His 1945 paper on it is still taught in economics courses today.
Cigarettes have since largely lost that role in American prisons, where research shows ramen noodles have taken over as the currency of choice since smoking bans spread through the 2000s and 2010s — proof that even an informal currency needs a supply that’s actually available to stay in circulation.
5. When Squirrel Fur Was Legal Tender
In medieval Kievan Rus’, the smallest unit of currency was literally called veksha — “squirrel” — worth a fraction of the kuna, a unit whose name originally meant “marten-skin.” Tribute to rulers was recorded as being paid in actual pelts, which circulated as small change alongside silver, even as “kuna” gradually became more of an abstract unit of value than a literal animal skin.
The name outlived the fur by nearly a thousand years: Croatia’s currency, used right up until it adopted the euro in 2023, was called the kuna — a direct linguistic descendant of medieval marten-pelt money.
6. Money You Could Also Eat
The Aztecs used cacao beans as everyday currency, and colonial-era records preserved surprisingly precise exchange rates: one bean bought five chiles or twenty small tomatoes; three beans got you an avocado or a turkey egg; thirty beans bought a small rabbit; a good turkey hen ran about a hundred beans. Quality control mattered too — two hundred good beans were worth as much as two hundred and thirty inferior ones, and counterfeiters were known to hollow out bean shells or mold fakes from clay.
7. The Coin That Weighed as Much as a Person's Leg
Sweden had plenty of copper but very little silver, so it started minting copper coins at their full equivalent weight in silver value — and copper is a lot less dense. The result was the heaviest coin ever officially put into circulation: a rectangular 10-daler plate from 1644 that weighed 19.7 kilograms (about 43 pounds) and measured roughly a foot by two feet. They were so unwieldy that merchants started leaving them in vaults and trading receipts for them instead — a direct forerunner of Europe’s first banknotes, issued in Stockholm in 1661.
8. Were Roman Soldiers Really Paid in Salt?
Whatever Form It Takes, We'll Help You Track It
From carved stone to cowrie shells to cigarettes, money has always needed one thing to actually work: someone keeping an honest, trusted record of who owns what. That’s still the job today — AMF Advisors keeps your books accurate, reconciled, and ready whenever you need them.