To Tyler Renny
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IamLEAM1983
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3709
- Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:54 am
- Location: Quebec, Canada
To Tyler Renny
If the market is so lax on Paradise, why doesn't the Credit economy crash?
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IamLEAM1983
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3709
- Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:54 am
- Location: Quebec, Canada
As Tyler Renny
"Yeah - we get that a lot from your economists. We tell them the same thing we tell everyone else: forget Earth's markets when you come here.
In your gravity well and in your own colonies, money's money. It has value, but that value's dependent on directing rates. These things shift based on other legal tender or the way the estimated net worth of a pound of gold or a barrel of crude. It's math interfering and influencing math. Like a lot of co-dependent mathematical structures, you can just pick at one thread if you're enough of a hard-on for fast profits - as long as you're willing to deal with what happens when it all comes crashing down.
The closest thing you've got to our Credit system is your Bitcoin. You crunch a hash formula along with a few million other contestants, and then get to shit out one Bitcoin or a fraction of one if you're the one who solves the equation in time before your hash server resets. The faster the hardware, the more likely you are to make mint.
We Drifters have been making mint forever, honestly. Right after the Riot, we realized we needed to organize ourselves to survive. The brainier ones among us came up with an algo that basically turned tertiary Maintainer cores into ASICs. If everyone's minting, then, sticking a monetary value on our Credit chits gets kinda hard. The first few thousand years had us figuring how much certain tasks or jobs were worth, ideally, and how to make our ASICs uncrackable. Once that happened and inflation started to manifest, we had our own workable currency.
Still, a lot of what we do runs on barter or trade - along with the occasional threat or gang war. Credits weren't really anything more than markers for a transaction, seeing as nobody actually buys anything casually. Trades and IOUs are casual. Outright purchases, though - these things are as serious and exceptional for us as Fae Oaths are for most mortals.
If someone buys you a drink on Earth, they're just being nice. If someone buys you a drink on Paradise, though - they're investing in you as a person or a resource. If you take that bought drink, your skills or knowledge change hands.
If you step into a bar and down swill without so much as worrying about your tab, you're just another freighter looking to be forgotten. Pass your vidcon ID by the barman, and that means you're looking to trade services. That might get you the introductory fancy drink.
Pull out your chit, though? That means you're looking to start a professional relationship. Remember that, hover up to New Shibuya in Sector 7, and notice how many goddamn restaurants, furniture or electronics stores there are... All Yakuza fronts, if they're not owned by old Transgenic pro-Elysium hard-timers or some of your Mab fantards and your flunkies to cosmic horrors. All of them know what buying things means, here - and they know you normies won't know.
The next thing you hear, some sweet human tourist from California goes ass-deep into alien sex trade rings because some third-rate Carissian pimp figures he owns her ass after getting her a cracked quantum-string six-zettabyte Flash drive at a discount.
If you stay here long enough, you learn to take a few things into consideration. Everyone's a pirate, a hacker and a thief, for one. One guy out of four would have assault charges, back on Earth. One out of ten is a murderer. Fraud's pretty rampant. We don't have laws on Paradise - just police. Whichever gang nabs Central and keeps it gets to keep the peace. It has to. For the past few centuries, it's been me and my boys, the Dusters.
Trades are clean. Services rendered, even cleaner. Money's bloody. There isn't a damn chit in circulation that hasn't seen blood money. Those poor kids with the passport and the Earth-made chits; they're carrying blood money."
In your gravity well and in your own colonies, money's money. It has value, but that value's dependent on directing rates. These things shift based on other legal tender or the way the estimated net worth of a pound of gold or a barrel of crude. It's math interfering and influencing math. Like a lot of co-dependent mathematical structures, you can just pick at one thread if you're enough of a hard-on for fast profits - as long as you're willing to deal with what happens when it all comes crashing down.
The closest thing you've got to our Credit system is your Bitcoin. You crunch a hash formula along with a few million other contestants, and then get to shit out one Bitcoin or a fraction of one if you're the one who solves the equation in time before your hash server resets. The faster the hardware, the more likely you are to make mint.
We Drifters have been making mint forever, honestly. Right after the Riot, we realized we needed to organize ourselves to survive. The brainier ones among us came up with an algo that basically turned tertiary Maintainer cores into ASICs. If everyone's minting, then, sticking a monetary value on our Credit chits gets kinda hard. The first few thousand years had us figuring how much certain tasks or jobs were worth, ideally, and how to make our ASICs uncrackable. Once that happened and inflation started to manifest, we had our own workable currency.
Still, a lot of what we do runs on barter or trade - along with the occasional threat or gang war. Credits weren't really anything more than markers for a transaction, seeing as nobody actually buys anything casually. Trades and IOUs are casual. Outright purchases, though - these things are as serious and exceptional for us as Fae Oaths are for most mortals.
If someone buys you a drink on Earth, they're just being nice. If someone buys you a drink on Paradise, though - they're investing in you as a person or a resource. If you take that bought drink, your skills or knowledge change hands.
If you step into a bar and down swill without so much as worrying about your tab, you're just another freighter looking to be forgotten. Pass your vidcon ID by the barman, and that means you're looking to trade services. That might get you the introductory fancy drink.
Pull out your chit, though? That means you're looking to start a professional relationship. Remember that, hover up to New Shibuya in Sector 7, and notice how many goddamn restaurants, furniture or electronics stores there are... All Yakuza fronts, if they're not owned by old Transgenic pro-Elysium hard-timers or some of your Mab fantards and your flunkies to cosmic horrors. All of them know what buying things means, here - and they know you normies won't know.
The next thing you hear, some sweet human tourist from California goes ass-deep into alien sex trade rings because some third-rate Carissian pimp figures he owns her ass after getting her a cracked quantum-string six-zettabyte Flash drive at a discount.
If you stay here long enough, you learn to take a few things into consideration. Everyone's a pirate, a hacker and a thief, for one. One guy out of four would have assault charges, back on Earth. One out of ten is a murderer. Fraud's pretty rampant. We don't have laws on Paradise - just police. Whichever gang nabs Central and keeps it gets to keep the peace. It has to. For the past few centuries, it's been me and my boys, the Dusters.
Trades are clean. Services rendered, even cleaner. Money's bloody. There isn't a damn chit in circulation that hasn't seen blood money. Those poor kids with the passport and the Earth-made chits; they're carrying blood money."