Ahem.
To understand why the Atlantis Carnet is so important, I need to continue my exposition of the nature of money, fast, medium, and slow: the one that Dennett waved away. If you are Andrea, or another of my ilk, you might as well skip this section of my correspondence. If you’re here to pick up the pieces . . . well, read on.
Let us ignore for the time being the ontology of money, the question of where money comes from and what money is. Instead, let us contemplate the teleology of money—the purpose it serves and how form follows purpose.
Cash is fast money. We use it for immediate exchanges of value. Goods and labor: You sell, I buy; we negotiate the value on either side of the balance sheet (what are your goods worth to you? What is this service worth to me?) by collapsing desire to an integer. Cash is unidimensional. Cash is fast. Cash is dumb. Cash destroys information about values inherent in previous transactions. Cash is bits and atoms. If you are human, whether Fragile or Post, you already know all about cash.
Medium money is something you buy with cash; something durable, something that is not easily liquidated or valued in fast money. Cathedrals and asteroids and debts and durable real estate and bonds backed by the honorable reputation of traders in slow money—it takes years for medium investments to rise and fall, many days or years to buy or sell them. Medium money is what you use to store your fast money when you’ve got more of it than you need for your immediate purposes. Medium money is the bony skeleton of a planetary economy, emerging out of human exchanges of status signals. Cash can crash or hyperinflate into valueless scrip, but if you converted it into a farm or a road or a home or to buy the loyalty of clients and the fealty of newly forked child instances, you will still have your medium money at the end of the fast money apocalypse.
The Fragile didn’t know these types of money by name; indeed, those of them who focused on the uses of capital mistook medium money for a special case of fast money. So the bubbles and crashes that rippled through their fast money systems frequently caused misery and massive infrastructure damage. By denominating them separately, by having a flexible exchange rate, modern economies decouple transient demand from the bones and muscles that underpin survival. It makes for stability, in the long term—but not long enough for slow vehicles.
Slow vehicles, such as starships.
Colony vessels and migratory habitats like cathedrals hurtle between the stars at unimaginable speeds; at thousands of kilometers per second, almost a measurable percentage of the speed of light. But while such a velocity is hard to comprehend, the distance between the stars is vast. Here, at the tip of my thumb, is a G2 star, the sun beneath the rays of which the Fragile were born. The span of the fingers of my hand takes us to Earth, their home world. To reach the inner edge of the Kuiper belt, the second asteroidal debris belt beyond the outermost of the planets, is a distance of perhaps three meters. Lonely, icy Eris orbits between four and ten meters away. On this vast scale, a centimeter represents ten million kilometers. But the distance to the nearest star is over five thousand meters. The distance from Earth to Shin-Tethys is over forty kilometers. And it would take one of our starships nearly four millennia to cross that gulf.
Starships, of necessity, travel light. The cost of building and launching one is crippling—and the cost of building one that could carry the millions of bodies with different skills that it takes to render a new star system fit for habitation would be impossible. So we make do by sending starships with only a skeleton crew. The job of the starship’s complement is to build a beacon and trade for skills with the neighbors, to solicit immigrants via laser transmission and build new bodies for them. It’s teleportation, of a kind. But this takes slow money.
Slow money is a medium of exchange designed to outlast the rise and fall of civilizations. It is the currency of world-builders, running on an engine of debt that can only be repaid by the formation of new interstellar colonies, passing the liability ever onward into the deep future—or forgiven by the Jubilee, a systemwide reset of the financial system entailing nullification of all debts, but that becomes less feasible the more colonies we create. By design, the slow money system is permanently balanced on the edge of a liquidity crisis, for every exchange between two beacons must be cryptographically signed by a third-party bank in another star system: It takes years to settle a transaction. It’s theft-proof, too—for each bitcoin is cryptographically signed by the mind of its owner, stored in one of their slots. Your slow money assets are, in a very real manner, an aspect of your identity. Nobody would think to detach from their roots and emigrate to a new colony for pay in any other currency; for the very slowness of slow money guarantees that it isn’t vulnerable to bubbles and depressions and turbulence and the collapse of any currency that is limited to a single star system.
Now pay attention, please: There is a protocol to understand.
Suppose I wish to hire you—in another star system—to loan me a copy of your soul as indentured labor for a decade or two. Obviously, I must pay in slow money (and pay double, for both copies of you). I send you a signed dollar, one that can be authenticated by a third-party bank as having originated in my own bank. (The authentication step takes place in another star system that I cannot physically control, for it is distant.) Once you receive my coin, you sign it and send a copy of it to the third-party bank for verification. Meanwhile, you upload yourself to my vicinity and again send a copy of the signed coin to the bank. The bank can now countersign the coin—having received two copies of it, you have proven to it that you have traveled from your first location to mine, fulfilling the contract—and sends an activation checksum back to each copy of you, which confirms that each of you are in possession of half a dollar. (Or, by prior arrangement, only one instance of you ends up in possession of the dollar—issuing banks, and only issuing banks, can break coins. As to where the coins come from, that is another question entirely, and I shall discuss it at length later in this report.)
Thus do we pay for interstellar services. It is the ancient dance of the three-phase commit, and it can take many years to complete, for slow money effectively travels at a third of the speed of light. It is cumbersome but very secure. The transactions are tied to the identity of the person or bank that owns the money—you can’t steal slow money without kidnapping or mindrape or fraud. How does the bank know you have traveled? That’s easy to prove; beacon stations watching different stars record the arrival of your signed bitcoins from physically separate star systems. You can’t forge it—not without a starship. You can’t inflate the quantity in circulation—the bitcoin algorithm used to prime issuing banks prevents that. Short of rewriting the laws of mathematics and physics, it’s solid.