| From: | korishinzo@*****.com (Ice Heart) |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Money and ID (getting longer) |
| Date: | Tue, 19 Nov 2002 15:38:04 -0800 (PST) |
materials, and partly my extrapolation of SR
materials. You have been warned.
> Now this bit I have issues with...
> IMOSHO cash must be available on the streets of the
> sixth world. If nothing
> else, Joe Public likes to open his wallet and see a
> wadge of greenbacks
> there. How do 'runners pay their contacts, Lone Star
> pay their snitches,
> corps pay couriers on deliveries that _MUST_ remain
> untracable.
> If Registered and Certified credit are the only ways
> to move money then
> that requires that every busker has a credstick
> verification reader and a
> matrix hook-up, every bootblack must have the same
> and every single joygirl
> must slot a credstick as well as everything else.
> More importantly they must all have SINs; in order
> to receive credit other
> than as an entire certified credstick requires a
> bank account, which
> requires a SIN; as only the corps and major clearing
> banks can create
> crertified credit. That means that (according to New
> Seattle 32% of the
> 3,000,000 Seattlites are below the poverty line, I'd
> guess that at _least_
> an equal number are SINless) approximately one
> million people have
> absolutely no way of exchanging "funds"...
> How come the Barrens still exist? Everyone should
> have died of years ago,
> there's no means for them to grow food, charity can
> be in no way sufficient
> to feed all of them. they have little to trade,
> barter is virtually
> pointless...
You need to read some old sourcebooks. Credsticks can
be used to transfer funds directly, from one to
another. The "back" of one credstick has a port that
can accept the readable "front" end of a credstick.
Such transactions do not become official until the
credstick has been checked by a machine with a matrix
connection, but the funds transfer. The balance on
the stick changes. Now, in the Barrens, where few
people have a Matrix connection, the same binary data
(electronic funds) may have been bouncing between
credsticks for decades. The Mp of financial info on
the credsticks has value because the people in the
Barrens assign it a value. Like any money since the
invention of currency over pure barter systems.
> Cerified credit is almost as tracable as registered,
> the stick links to an
> account, that account has records in the same way as
> any other. IMO a major
> corp has its own Black Ops teams, the problem with
> them is that they're
> tracable to the corp, they appear in personnel
> records (albeit very well
> hidden) they're paid, their equipment is mostly
> purchased by the corp.
> Deniable Assets must have no direct link to the corp
> if they're paid from a
> corp's accounts (including via shell companies,
> holding companies... etc.)
> Look at Blood in the Boardroom, Richard Villiers
> buys Fuchi holdings
> through dozens of different holding companies and
> he's still traced.
> Imagine some of the "bad" 'runs which I've heard
> described; building
> demolitions with death tolls running into the
> thousands... If that sort of
> thing was even remotely tracable exactly what would
> the Corporate Court do
> to the corp which sent the 'runners? Yes the corps
> can, and often do pay
> certified credit which has been "laundered" but a
> breifcase full of large,
> unmarked, nonsequential bills still has to be the
> least tracable methods
> around...
The economy of Shadowrun is almost entirely
"cashless". Paper and metal currency simply do not
exchange hands. Certified credsticks ARE cash. (This
is in the SR3 main book, btw, page 239.) Somewhere
back in the early 2030's, when the push for a cashless
economy was first mounted, banks would had exchange
programs, cash for certified credsticks. Remember, in
2029, many things that made "cash" valuable were lost,
such as people's trust in the governments that printed
the money. Dollars, euros, rubles, and any other
currency, are bvased on the belief that the currency
represents real value. In America, it is gold; a
staple of currency and currency markets for centuries.
Now, when people no longer believed that the American
government would give them a dollar of gold for their
paper dollar, upon demand, the value of the dollar
began to fall. After the Crash, no one believed the
government could do anything at all, let alone honor
their currency. SR sourcebooks have repeatedly stated
that the ONLY place UCAS paper money is used AT ALL is
in corners of the Barrens. For what? Someone decides
that a quart of synthahol is worth 200 UCAS dollars.
Everyone agrees, since they are the only one with
synthahol. Now, someone else says that a quart of
milk is 10 percent as good as a quart of synthahol, so
they want 20 dollars for it. And people agree,
handing over cash, or portions of synthahol, for the
milk. And so on. The difference is that many people
trust the LED readout on the side of a grubby old
credstick over the face of a peice of paper they
cannot even read. So they believe that the 200 nuyen
the stick claims to hold becomes 190 (because they see
the numbers change on their stick and on the other
guy's stick) when they buy a quart of synthahol, and
would allow them to buy 19 more before it was empty.
And everyone agrees. You say Joe Public wants to see
a wad of greenbacks in their wallet. Maybe today,
because that is a tangible symbol of wealth and
comfort. In 2060, that may well be a tangible symbol
of surplus toilet paper. Maybe it is glowing green
LEDs resplendant with many zeroes that really warms
the heart and pocket of Joe Public in 2060.
> The elimination of cash would have a huge impact on
> crime, why mug a man if
> there is no chance of taking anything you can use
> without a massive
> criminal network to launder the money. But when you
> consider the savings
> crime can result in for a corp (in the form of
> industrial espionage mostly
> but where would Lone Star be without crime, how much
> does Ares save by
> contracting out Knight Errant when they aren't doing
> Ares work?) it makes
> less sense to eliminate the petty criminals, the big
> ones, the major
> organisations will still be there.
But, if a certified credstick is good for the funds
displayed on the side of the stick, no matter who
holds it, why not go ahead and mug the guy? Better
than a wad of useless paper that only mutant beer
merchants in Glow City will even accept as valuable.
My take on money in SR is a whole lot more compliant
with the system FASA first designed.
Sure, only a bank can issue a certified credstick. So
Mr. Johnson walks into First Seattle Bank and orders
100 Certified credsticks holding 10,000 each. He pays
with a Registered Credstick from Anycorp, a shell
company owned by Diginonymous Inc. Which is in turn
an investment portfolio for Tom, Dick, and Harry, LLC.
The money is all but untraceable, but who cares? The
bank got verified cred (say, a check) from another
bank (or ten). It issued in turn a box of credsticks
all with nice green glowing LEDs proclaiming the
number 10,000. Each stick points to a dummy account
called Cash. Cash0001, Cash0002, Cash0100, etc. The
bank holds the funds against the unique number for
that credstick...and nothing else. Now, Mr' J uses
these sticks to pay a bunch of runners. Who in turn
spend some money off the sticks, move some to other
sticks, and even give some of the sticks away to cover
costs of their own. And so the sticks travel, funds
going up and down, through the streets of Seattle.
Every so often, one is plugged into a terminal with
matrix access. Immediately, the First Seattle Bank
logs the access, and checks the balance. Stick number
555001, referencing account Cash01, has only 7,000 on
it, and 13 transaction. 3,000 is moved from Cash01 to
Cash_General. Long ago 3,000 moved out of
Cash_General. Accounting smartframes note that last
quarter, Cash_General received 3,000,000 transaction
requests. It adds up the funds moved to and from
Cash0001 to Cash9999. It notes that the amounts
balance pretty well, across all acounts, and that
Cash_General has the correct amounts flowing back and
forth through it. It all matches up, and the bank is
happy. They got their 5% (or whatever) fee for the
original setup of the accounts, and they get the
interest on any fnuds sitting idle in Cash0001 throguh
Cash9999, along with any interest generated by
Cash_General, as profit. Who is using Cash 0765, and
where, is not relevant data. Tracking that data would
be IMMENSELY expensive in system resources, especially
if they decided to track more than one stick, through
more than one transaction cycle. Only at the request
of big corps and governments would the bank track the
trivial data...like the serial numbers on paper bills.
Get it? Electronic cash is already in development,
and credsticks are not so very imporbable. Already,
credit cards carry microchips, and card readers are
getting smaller every year. How long till two cards
can read each other, exchange info, and report the
alteration later, when used at any ATM? Does the bank
really care that the $400 bucks came off John Doe's
card? Sure. Right up until they have to track a few
billion such transaction a day. Then maybe they only
care that the money came from Card
1234-5678-9012-3456. How about when a month passes
between times the card hits a reader with internet
access? Maybe it starts to care only that the 1's and
0's are not corrupted, and that the quarterly finance
reports match up the debits and credits alright.
Especially if one can walk into a gas station and buy
a card for 10 bucks cash, that says "I *heart* New
York" on it. The card carries ten bucks, and
additional fuinds cannot be written. And then, as
cash becomes less and less common, Joh Smith buys two
dozen such cards, and gives them to his friends. And
one year, an online auction payment company offers
cards which are writable. For a low low one time fee.
You sign up for one, paying for it with a pre-pay "I
*heart* New York" card John Smith bought you last
year. The card is issued to
Gettin_Jiggy_Wittit@********.mtx, living at P.O. Box
555, Seattle, WA, 12345. Trust me, at this point, the
bank is happy just to keep the books balanced. Mr.
Wittit could be a pine tree for all they care, as long
as the funds that get written to the card came from
somewhere, and will eventually go somewhere else.
Bank to bank to bank around the world and back.
This is what will really happen. Paper money has an
average life of 3 years. Coins last longer, but are
inconveniently heavy and bulky. The cost of
maintaining physical currency is MASSIVE. The
marginal savings realized by moving to a cashless
economy are immense. The minute someone finds a way
to have anonymous, reliable e-cash, the
dollar/euro/etc is a dinosaur. Poof. Gone. And
organized crime will be one of the the driving forces
in pulling cash off the streets in favor of e-cash.
Because there is tremendous graft available in a
currency change. The adult entertainment industry, of
course, will test and perfect the actual use of the
new "cash".
> I hope I haven't put anyone to sleep with that :-)
Oh I know I have. :)
======Korishinzo
--E-cash will be universal within 10 years..betcha
1,000,000 dollars (UCAS) ;p
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