Cash is fast money. We use it for immediate exchanges of value. Goods and labor: You sell, I buy; we negotiate the value of 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 akes 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 youve got more of it than you need for your immeidate purposes. Medium money is the bony skeleton of a planetary economy, emerging out of human exchanges of status symbols. 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. 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 liabilitiy 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. Its theft-proof, too—for each bitcoin is cryptographically signed by the mind of its own, 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 isnt vulnerable to bubbles and depressions and turbulence and the collapse of any currency that is limited to a single star system.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 16:56:55 +0000
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