SSS was first started by a nine-year-old named Lavanya. It was originally a game of collecting certain types of stones. Soon, however, people began to trade stones for services, such as getting a stone sharpened. This slowly morphed into trading other things. But as stones were the currency, people would just pick up stones, rather than using the stones they had actually earned. This led to the creation of notes. And the rest, as they say, is history...
Origins
Although there was no definite "beginning" of SSS, it is generally considered to have been started by Lavanya M.M. when she started her shop Rock Seller in 2008.
Before this time, Lavanya and her friends were making "rock gardens" in the Nesting Grounds, where they would collect and display any interesting sticks, stones, or other objects they found. It was Lavanya who had the idea of starting an exchange system, where people could take any stone they liked from her shop, in exchange for another one of the same size.
This exchange soon evolved into a system where people could take any amount of stones, and exchange them with another set of stones of (approximately) the same volume. Meanwhile, Lavanya started a stone-sharpening service, where one could get their (big) stone sharpened in exchange for two small stones. Soon, sharp stones became the unit of exchange, with people trading in units of small, medium, and large sharp stones.