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IamLEAM1983
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To Travis

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

So, now that things have been rebuilt at least a bit, what's driving the economy?
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IamLEAM1983
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Post by IamLEAM1983 »

"With Melmoth unofficially driving Greed, we thought we'd be able to pluck whatever fungible assets we'd need out of Hell and keep ourselves afloat that way. Luckily for us - or unluckily for anyone who'd been hoping for massive investment bootstraps - he's being conservative with the Pit's own mint. He's not wearing the crown so it's not, you know, out of greed, but because he doesn't want us to limp away from the Planar War and then end up devaluing everything we'd ever need to survive. He's doling out caches of what we need as directing rates set by the International Stock Exchange and Heaven allow - and it's a slow-going process. Not every mineral seam was tainted by Mammon or Valefor, but entire holdings that used to prop up the mining sectors in countries like South Africa are in a shambles. Plus, Paradise is stuck buying its uranium cores from us for the time being - and nuclear energy is still a top commodity.

So, well... We've had to improvise. The entire world implemented Paradise's credit chip system in less than three months, and physical cash is now almost strictly used for black-market stuff. Now, most of everyone is crunching a hashed file on something at nearly every hour of every day, no matter if it's an implant, a phone or your standard desktop. Currency names haven't changed, but the dollar's going rate now lives and dies on the tech sector's willingness to design durable and reliable hash cores alongside standard CPUs. Every single cent your phone mints is sent back to the US Federal Reserve through single-byte packet authentification, and then the corresponding value is wired back to you almost instantaneously. Now, more than ever, you're waving shirt sleeves or bracelets against contact readers to pay, if you haven't just sewn your tag inside your coat and understand that you're going to be billed for any purchases as long as you're within the premises. Cashiers still exist, but their job is to troubleshoot automated transactions that don't go through. Could be that your chip's been cloned, or that you somehow managed to break one of its gold traces when you tossed it in the dryer. Cashiers are there to help you with that, and to accept cash transactions. Even with our willingness to transition, the Jones administration says it'll still be a good decade or so before we mint the last physical coin in America.

Then there's the weirdness the Pitspawn brought along. You've heard of NFTs, right? Well, imagine uncast spells being bid on alongside mint-condition and unused Pride Knight surplus. Greed's got some really unique ideas on what's a fungible asset and what isn't, so Jack fricking Dorsey selling his first Tweet for millions isn't anything new, now. Imagine allied Pride Knights getting sick of the whole buff Diablo expy look and selling their actual strength on a piecemeal basis, with no standard monetary strings attached! We've been seeing high-order succubi and incubi pawning off their libido for impotent mortals, or some of Lyman's colleagues offering guilt-free night-long culinary bashes to severely allergic people on Craigslist. Sloth's knocked overworked people on the verge of a breakdown into weekend-long snoozes with a few exchanged tokens and, well, the local smattering of Warlocks, Tom included, have been putting price tags on any displays that don't help friends or further the reconstruction effort. There's non-deployed curses of Magnus' in the wild, now, sitting on rune-engraved wood pucks, that go for hundreds of thousands on the same auction sites you would've reserved for antique crap!

The short of it is we're changing, and not everyone likes it. Try telling a Wyrm that his gold hoard doesn't have any value if we can't use those coins to trace circuits or design solar panels or use some of it in our medical nanite suspensions..."
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