Faeries liking food is cute. Eventually he's running out of ideas though.

"We should head on to the next one anyway."

"Thanks for your time, everybody!" says Cam as they head out.

"I think they'll use it. Some. If the people they trade with use it."

"Well, let's hit all their neighbors, then. Maybe I can occasionally throw snack parties where I make stuff in bulk to vend?"

"That'll help, yeah. It's a useful idea, it's just a odd one and the complicated rules about your hours are confusing. Though I don't know that it'd be better not to mention it."

"Seems like it'd be rude, someone would be like 'ha, I thought of an obvious flaw in the system' and show up and I'm closed and they're annoyed, probably."

"Yeah. - I suspect we will get some people who accumulate lots of them and come to you with an order. Even with the substantial debt-related deterrent to doing that."

"I mean that seems a little like - investing? Generating value and hanging on to it for a while. Maybe eventually there will be better investments available. But yeah I can put in the compliance paperwork how they plan to square it?"

"Sounds good."

"It'll be fun when there are better investments available!"

"Yes. It will." Bounce bounce.

"Although we might have to do more complicated finagling for things structured like functional loans with an expected loss rate to work..."

"Hmmm. Debt doesn't account at all for the probability it won't be repaid, debts accumulate exactly the same to someone who's about to die."

"I mean, ideally you want it to be possible for some fraction of people to default on a loan put toward a risky but worthwhile venture without everything being ruined forever, and then the investor just invests in a thousand things and enough of them pan out."

"Oooohhhhh." Longing sigh.

"Doesn't work so well if your risky venture failing means you get stuck tangled up with your investor though."

"Yeah. There might be some way to do it as a series of bets, I'd have to think about it."

"Ooh, that might work depending on how debt handles bets, investments aren't that dissimilar from bets except both parties hope for the same outcome..."

Nodnod. "That makes it not obvious how you finagle it but it feels like there ought to be some way. Debt handles bets pretty gracefully. If I bet you some of my possessions that something won't happen, and it does, they're yours now and transferring them to you doesn't create debt in either direction. Having an open bet creates entanglement. You can't use this to clear large debts for free because it doesn't count if both parties are confident in the same direction, and it doesn't count if the disagreement is too complicated for the universe to resolve it. I wrote a book - it's called "Betting" -"

Cam has a copy of this book now. "Can you make it work if they merely have different confidences in the same direction, that works for human betting..."

"Yep, as long as they meaningfully disagree or if they're both about even odds and willing to take opposite sides of that."

"That'd limit investment but not cut it off altogether, especially if it only cares about odds and not about return - see, an investor can afford to invest in stuff that will almost certainly fail as long as a success would be good enough and there's enough of the things and they have enough fallback cushion in case they're unlucky on every one."

"Hmm. I think there's a way to do it though I don't see the structure yet. What are investors - being promised, exactly -"

"A typical structure is that you construe an enterprise such as a business - originally I think it was boats or boat voyages? - as a thing you can own a tiny fraction of. If the enterprise survives, the investor collects some number of tiny fractions of it, 'shares', and is entitled to sell them at a value that winds up tracking the value of the enterprise entire, and also sometimes the enterprise just gives all its shareholders money in proportion to their ownership. If the enterprise fails the shares don't exist, or I guess if necessary you could have them exist as a legal fiction but they wouldn't be connected to anything profit-generating."