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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cristian Andreu" data-source="post: 6518511" data-attributes="member: 23822">Geographical availability is a very important factor in this. You could arguably have waterstone in hard-to-reach or otherwise unknown locations, allowing for life to florish or at leats subsist, while still keeping it extremely valuable within civilized lands.A good example of how this works is salt. During most of human history, salt was very expensive not because there's little of it, but because most deposits were far away from the main centers of population. The Malinese, for instance, became extremely rich in the Middle Ages thanks to their control over both gold and salt deposits, that they traded extensively with Northern Africa and Europe. They had huge amounts of it, but the combination of distance, slow (and risky) means of transportation, and pretty inelastic demand (ie, no matter how much salt they traded, people still demanded more) kept it an extremely valuable commodity well into the Modern Age. And in a somewhat similar fashion as waterstones, humans need salt to live.So maybe there are tribes out there using waterstone but without regular contact with the main centers of civilization, so their supply doesn't impact the total availability. Maybe a local monarch could be sitting above a huge reserve of the stuff, yet keep its trade tightly controlled because that's the source of his wealth (or because of some cultural/religious rule that forbids mass-trading of the stuff).Perhaps they could be trated like silkworms, which for a long time were forbidden from trade because keeping silk available only in the Far East meant both the Islamic and Christian worlds were forced to use the Silk Route and thus provide extensive monetary benefits to the Mongols who controlled it.Point is, even if there was an entire mountain of the stuff half the way across the world, sustaining an entire jungle full of life, it would have little or no effect on it's price if there was no reliable manner of transporting it all the way back to civilization. And even if someone figured out how, they would most likely keep the method to themselves and roll in the cash its regulated trade would provide.</blockquote>

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