"Auda?" calls Cam. "Is this a good time for the money thing?"

"Sure."

Experiments!!! (With graphs!)

Adding an extra human into the mix enables the collection of more data but doesn't fundamentally alter how the debt system functions. The value of a coin or a written script or anything of the sort tends to be about halfway between its intrinsic value and the amount Cam's willing to trade it for.

" - there's a way to do something with this but I haven't thought of it yet," he says, looking at the graphs.

"You know the fundamental problem with this damn thing is it doesn't acknowledge gains from trade. Or losses from trade, like, who actually gets that much out of kicking people who lie to them, intrinsically... Gains from trade is my favorite economic concept, it's like, any time someone goes to the trouble of making a voluntary well-informed exchange they're both richer afterwards, in terms of their own values? And this fucking debt system thinks things just go around with labels stuck to them saying 'worth yea many Debt Bucks' with only a little wiggle room for other things also valued in Debt Bucks you could hypothetically swap them for..."

"We have the concept. The difference between what something's worth to you and how much debt it costs you...that's why people use sex to settle so much, because for almost all people there's a big difference between how much it costs and how much you'd mind it -"

"Where is it getting these metaphorical sticker prices??"

"I don't know!!!!"

"Ugh!" Cam could pace, but doesn't. He does sit down on his bed. "It's just ignoring all the - what else does it ignore?"

"Doesn't care about what your alternatives are. Doesn't care about your state of information. Tends to undervalue how much people enjoy things, if you're comparing its prioritization to theirs. Sex with humans isn't typically more expensive even though apparently it's bad for them or something? I'm not sure what it's not caring about, there, but it's something."

"I mean, it's probably ever not been bad for some humans for faeries to have sex with them. Is there some trick we can pull with state of information - if in fact someone walks up to me and says the passphrase and presents me with a token I'll give them a pineapple, but we don't actually tell anyone the passphrase, does the token settle somewhere below the value of a pineapple and stick there -"

"- it should, yeah. Oh, or if you'll redeem the token at a given price but you are often away visiting all the courts and there's a very long line whenever you're here I don't think that matters either."

"- ha, holy shit, a use for bread lines."

"Hmmm?"

"So there were these countries where they decided that money's stupid and instead they should just have central planners figure out how much of everything people need and government producers make it all and hand it out. This works really badly. Instead of sorting who gets, for example, bread, by who's willing to cough up a couple bucks, they wind up allocating the bread by who is willing to stand in line for like six hours, and then no one, not the baker and not the shopkeeper and not the consumer, gets the value of those six hours, but at least enough people give up and go home that bread-to-people matching is, in a manner of speaking, solved. But if all we're trying to do is fool the stupid debt system, making it pointlessly inconvenient to perform an exchange can be functional! We just make it inconvenient enough that nobody does it - I can be open for five minutes alternate Tuesdays and require a lot of compliance paperwork and stuff, something like that - and the system ignores all that deadweight loss and just pays attention to how many Debt Bucks somebody actually sitting through all that crap would get - right?"

"I think so but let's test it."

"What shall I stand ready to exchange for what?"

"That's a good question. We want - we want a stably-valued object everyone can use for trade. Its value according to the debt system will be in between what you claim to be willing to trade it for, and what the debt system considers its intrinsic value. So if I'm willing to trade for it at its debt-system value, and so are most other people, because inconvenience is making up for the rest of the difference -

- or if you have a flock of humans willing to trade for it at its debt-system value, making trading at that value far more straightforward than trading at its declared-value-to-you -

- then it seems like in some sense we'd have a coin with an agreed-upon value that the debt system agrees on too. But that's not - it's not doing that much more than just having fancy coins with high intrinsic value, not if that's all we do with it."

"- sorry, what's the humanity of the humans doing in this instance, can't we get faeries to also be willing to do that -"

"They have to get the goods and services they're predictably willing to trade for the coins from you, and if this involves entangling them with you then it doesn't work as well."

"Doesn't anyone have enough stuff lying around without me helping?"

"I assume lots of people will be willing to use the coins once lots of other people are using them, so hopefully eventually we enable better trading among those people, but they've got no reason to start."

"Yeah, fair enough, I can operate as a sort of bank to kick it off. What's missing, hmmmm..."

"I want to - I don't know. Award extra value for doing things that are valuable beyond what the debt system considers them. If there's a way to pull that off."