The Baroque Trilogy is less clear as Isaac Newton mints new currency.
Does that mean that perhaps Stephenson's opinions were always that currency needs to be backed by something whether it is gold or national borders.
> It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold (or silver, or diamonds, or various other mythical and magical elements and gems that the Creatives would later add to the game world).
> Other online games did this by fiat. Gold pieces were reposited in dungeons guarded by monsters. The more powerful the monster, the more gold it was squatting on. To get the gold, you had to kill the monster, and building a character powerful enough to do so required a certain amount of time and effort. The system functioned okay, but in the end, the decision as to where the gold was located and how much effort was needed to win it was just an arbitrary choice made by a geek in a cubicle somewhere.
> Richard’s crazy idea was to eliminate the possibility of such fudging by having the availability of virtual gold stem from the same basic geological processes as in the real world. The same, that is, except that they’d be numerically simulated instead of actually happening.
> The media net was designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security, so that people could use it to transfer money. That's one reason the nationstates collapsed-as soon as the media grid was up and running, financial transactions could no longer be monitored by governments, and the tax collection systems got fubared.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Simoleon_Caper
In the story, the protagonist is an underemployed mathematician who resides in the house of his brother's family in Chicago. The brother, owner of an advertising agency, has won a large contract to create ads for "Simoleons", a form of non-governmental electronic "currency". To launch the product, they plan to give away 27 million Simoleons to the winners of a contest. The contest is based on the long-used format of "guess the number of jelly beans in the container", with Chicago's Soldier Field and 26 other football stadiums as the containers.
so, 1995 cryptobros, sports stadiums, and damn near NFTs.
Doesn't Snow Crash have hyperinflation followed by a plethora of private fiat currencies?
That's why I was so baffled as to why Facebook glommed on to the term "metaverse" with such fervor. The "metaverse" comes from that book, and is a major aspect of the dystopia. The term does not have positive connotations.
I've long thought that if I had to live in the world of Snow Crash, I would totally want to be in Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong over the other corporations. In context of the book, Mr. Lee kinda slapped.
One of the most amusing parts of that book was how the Mafia had recruiting booths at college job fairs, just like the other corporations.
How many brilliant minds signed off on that metaverse presentation I wonder. I'm still shocked. That's a lot of either coercion or people that enjoy smelling their own farts. They spent billions on it. Did I mention I'm still shocked? Shocked! None of it makes sense.
The real world is dominated by corporate domination, Regulatory capture, and stagnation. In the metaverse, it doesn't matter if you are a pizza delivery boy. You have power and agency if you have skills and determination, at least in comparison to the default world
I read the metaverse as a mechanism of control. People will put up with the dystopian hell of their everyday life because they can have the fantasy of power and control in the metaverse -- but in the end, it's the real world that is the only thing that actually matters and that's why it's fought over. Even the fights in the metaverse are just to further the fights in the real world.
Nobody with actual power /really/ cares about the metaverse except insofar as it can affect the real world.
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Here is a tiny story I once heard or read. I know it's only a very simplified, used to show debt based money creation, but such partial stories is all that's possible for this arbitrarily complex story of "money", because it's mostly a mind game of artificial rules. (If anyone can find this story I'd appreciate it, I don't remember where I read it, some book?)
A boy writes on a paper that he gives to his parents the promise to mow the lawn whenever that paper is presented to him to fulfill the promise. He got something in return from them right away, apparently the lawn didn't need trimming at that time so they resorted to the "debt paper". Instead of using it themselves the parents gave it to some neighbors in exchange for something they needed from them. And the neighbors too gave it to yet other neighbors. The promise to mow the lawn had become "money". As soon as somebody actually uses it to get their lawn mown it is destroyed, the "money" is gone.
So, all our debt based money, at least as far as it was created through companies or firms taking it on, is backe by various promises for money-cresting projects, for example
For a business it could be something like "I/we promise to build a factory that builds xyz and markets and sell it to _somewhere_."
For an individual consumer something like "I promise to work hard for ten years to create more value, i.e. make more money than the amount just created for me in advance of my promise."
So all that debt based money we keep using everywhere is not "merely paper without any value", it's backed by people's and businesses signed and certified promises to perform work and/or create measurable value.
Yes actual money is way more complicated, yet I find this story quite revealing. In all sciences we regularly use very simple "stories" too (e.g. the first model of the atom everybody learns, or the second, and third too, all way too simple from the PoV of the physicist, or molecular bonds taught in chemistry, getting more complicated with each iteration of level of education).
As far as I can see having the promise of a human to do something (valuable) is way more useful than anything else when averaging over all contexts. I'm sure one can easily think of specific contexts where something else is more valuable, but pointing it back at humans seems to me to be the most genius way of putting "value" behind the currency. That we have created soooo much more other stuff on top of the idea, for special situations and for special interests, IMO does not detract from it.
Also, that the banks can create money but need to find people willing to sign also looks like some really genius balanced design to me - as an idea, how it is then implemented in practice of course always suffers from the pulls of all the interests from all directions.
We also have a system that puts significant pressure on the debtors to fulfill their promises.
https://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Desire-Meaning-JAMES-BUCHAN/dp...