weavermount wrote:

Given that energy will still be a serious, maybe the only, limiter on what people can actually do. So I could imagine energy being used as a "gold standard". I could see it even being used as the anarchism-corporate currency.

"Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival." -CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly" Although I am a SMAC fan, I think the energy currency doesn't work well despite the importance of energy. If you used energy directly as a standard, then a 1 credit bill would give you the right to get X Joules of energy from the originator. Which is rather problematic since energy is hard to store and demand often involves a promptness factor - when I turn on my particle accelerator and demand a gigajoule from the Bank of Extropia they might have a hard time delivering that. Having a power currency (1 credit can be exchanged for X Watts of energy) is even worse: now the bank has to supply me with that power indefinitely. Some intermediary version (1 credit corresponds to X Joules delivered at a rate of Y Watts within Z seconds of demanding it) becomes rather non-fungible as a gold standard, since there would be lots of kinds of credits (how many "slow mild" credits is a "fast intense" credit worth?). Worse, the currency would be prone to serious inflation when new energy sources come online. If I open a huge new solar power array, the value of credits everywhere will go down slightly. It is like the effect of more gold on a gold standard economy. So the existing economic groups (not just the energy companies) would have a reason to try to prevent more energy sources from coming into existence, likely producing artificial scarcity. But this also applies to energy saving methods: inventing a way of running equipment on less energy has almost the same effect as adding a new energy source. So inventors would hurt the savings accounts of everybody and be discouraged by the main economic actors. There is a reason fiat currencies (where the value is just what people want to pay for the currency) are standard these days. They have their own problems (just consider the current Greece/euro mess or Zimbabwe hyperinflation), but pegging to resources becomes increasingly problematic when technology moves fast. If you want a good standard it needs to be resistant to change and naturally limited. This is incidentally why I don't think the inner system currencies of EP are pegged to qubits per se as stated in the book: it is too easy to build another qubit factory. But *distributing* entangled bits is hard and requires much coordination. So the real standard is actually *distributed qubit pairs*. I can imagine this coming about after the Fall since it is easier to run currency conversions using a standard than fiat currency when there is political chaos and great uncertainty about the future. The hypercorps decided on this standard, but know it will change as soon as things settle down (or qubit distribution starts to become too easy); then we will maybe get fiat currencies instead, backed by the Planetary Consortium, the Morningstar Federation and the others.