A closer look
Nomadic tribes and regional merchants across ancient Siberia, Mongolia, and rural China heavily utilized tightly compressed bricks of fermented tea leaves as their primary form of economic currency well into the middle of the twentieth century. These incredibly durable tea blocks were vastly superior to standard metallic coins because they could be effectively used to treat severe respiratory illnesses, heavily consumed as a highly nutritious soup during harsh winters, and quickly broken apart to provide highly precise financial change. Unlike our highly modern fiat currency which is totally useless outside of abstract trade, this brilliant agricultural money system actually provided direct physiological benefits to the impoverished people carrying it around. You literally cannot boil a highly encrypted bitcoin or violently eat a one-hundred-dollar bill when you are deeply starving, meaning ancient mountain herders possessed a far more robust financial safety net than any modern tech billionaire
