In fact, you could even use wampum to pay your taxes to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and pay your tuition at Harvard College. When Curt was signing up for a course in ocean systems at Harvard Extension School, he offered to pay the tuition with a strand of wampum. Wampum is typically a cylindrical bead, not a disk bead, and much of its value comes from the work that goes into drilling pieces of shell lengthwise, which is far more difficult than drilling the short way through. Although polished pieces of quahog shell are often sold as wampum, but they're really not wampum unless they have been drilled as beads. For the record, white wampum was also made from the central colums of whelk shells, which are also found in New England.
Whelk is softer and easier to drill, but it is never purple.
Also, whelk columns are pre-formed into a cylinder shape. The whelk might be the secret to how the Native Peoples produced as much wampum as they did. Much of the white wampum could have been whelk. However, the purple had to be quahog. Wampum's Native Heritage Rhode Island's Narragansetts, according to Roger Williams, were virtual minters of wampum.