312: Transcthonic Land Bank

ENTRY 312: Transcthonic Land Bank

"Do you believe in Earth? Do you believe in transhumanity? One day we will return, and retake our homeworld...and then what? Already, the Planetary Consortium has approved real estate lots, proceeds of the sales of which goes to aid the reclamation effort. For a few credits, you can invest now, and you or your children or fork can inherit the Earth..."
- Sophocles Clayton

Speculation is an addiction; transhumans are built for pattern recognition, their instincts geared toward risk/reward scenarios. Add in a dash of nostalgia, a dollop of hope, and some series metafinancing and you get the Transcthonic Land Bank, a special holding corporation established by the Planetary Consortium and entrusted with the full mineral and real estate rights of old Earth, to bundle, parcel, and sell these earthshares to whatever transhumans are gullible or saavy enough to buy them. Most of their customers are reclaimers and scam artists, the latter of which seem to crop up every couple of months working multi-level marketing schemes based around various old identities - like the New France Project, where a group of investors bought up the land and mineral rights to part of old Europe and then parceled it out, selling specific chunks of their geographic early life to post-French survivors and their descendents. "For only 1,000 credits you can own the ancestral orchard your dad was forced to leave behind." and other more subtle pitches still find a market, made all the sillier given that dad's farm is probably a sheet of radioactive glass right about now.

In addition to selling speculative parcels of old Earth, Transcthonic is also responsible for managing the trade in earthshares, and has established official (and, discreetly, underground) markets for the buying, selling, swapping, and tracking of earthshare prices. Here again the speculation market is in full tilt, and certain shares of prime real estate can fluctuate in share price, leading to an entire range of financial instruments that deal with betting on the rise or fall of earthshare prices - London may be high one day on rumors of the reclaimers getting their act together, then dive when the latest radio telemetry comes in to show the Thames as a dry riverbed that's on fire in places. Antarctica is usually regarded as the safest and most secure of investments, as it's seen some of the least damage during and since the Fall, and the large stock of ice-water has value on current markets.

Opponents of the Land Bank are many, and often question the legitimacy of the institution, with the Jovian Republic refusing to acknowledge its claims at all, and the Catholic Church insisting on the rights to what's left of Vatican City. Still, saavy investors point out that while a square kilometer of land currently averages 0.97 credits on the open market, if (or as they like to put it, as) the reclamation of Earth gets closer, the value of earthshares could increase exponentially, meaning that a very modest investment now can lead to substantial returns when the individual eventually cashes out...and, of course, it provides them with a good reason to further support reclaimer efforts.

Using Transcthonic Land Bank

Paying someone with an investment is a bit of a dick move, because it has limited current cash value. However, they have the advantage of giving the player characters an actual stake in the outcome of a conflict. The Transcthonic Land Bank and its earthshares are specifically designed for player characters working with reclaimers and their efforts to reinhabit the planet Earth, but plenty of microcorps and hypercorps might try to pay the player characters off in stocks and bonds which will be worth more if the corp continues to be successful, thus giving the PCs incentive not to turn around and screw with their former employers. In a larger sense, the same can be said for paying PCs off with credits, noyos, or a rep boost - what are these but investments in the larger economy of a given faction, habitat, or network?

Fun with paying player characters in earthshares aside, the Transcthonic Land Bank as a financial institution and marketplace is a suitable setting for any number of finance-related runs, where conflicting interests on the price of earthshares (and earthshare futures, derivatives, the New France bonds, etc.) can lead to employment or consequences for player characters as they or their habitats/factions/friends/etc. can tangled up in reclaimer schemes, hypermedia special reports, counterfeiting rings, and so on. Any rival Land Bank that seeks to set up shop is likely to face intense (if below the radar) interference from Transcthonic, whose board of directors control rather large amounts of credits and other assets based on the sale of earthshares, and they're no above hiring the PCs to drop a tungsten rod on their competitors from orbit to drive the point home. Of course, their position might change if it ever looks like reclamation will actually occur, because all the credits they've raised are themselves off in a diverse series of investments, and they could face serious difficulties if it ever looks like they have to pay out...

301: Bonus Point Bank

ENTRY 301: Bonus Point Bank

It used to be hard to bank a favor. Reputation networks trade on ephemeral currency, and it's up to the individual transhumans who they owe and how much a given favor is worth. Most transhumans in a network base requests against the individual's rep score, giving up some of their personal judgment in exchange for a like consideration. Still, a rep will only get you so far - especially out toward the brink, where the rep networks haven't all situated themselves yet, and membership is thin. You might have a solid rep back Sol-ward, but out past Jupiter where the network is maybe a half-dozen transhumans with limited resources, even a "small" favor can tax your rep fairly heavily. Given those kind of circumstances, sometimes people need a way to 'cash in' on their rep more directly.

The Bonus Point Bank began as a money laundering tool designed to abuse rep networks, and evolved into a service allowing network users to directly transfer their reputation into assets and vice versa. The 'bank' works as a collection of false identities plugged into the rep networks; users who wish to use their services transfer property or currency to the 'bank' and the group of identities upvotes the user's profile in the network in direct proportion, and later on that user can request a 'favor' from one of the cover identities in the form of the assets or property that they 'deposited.' The original incarnation of the Bonus Point Bank involved fees, but the contemporary version has been re-engineered as a fee-free service designed to extend network access in areas with a low density of network resources and assets.

Still, there remains some ethical qualms about the Bonus Point Bank and related services, as they actively subvert the trust-based nature of the reputation networks with the promulgation and use of false network identities, which are routinely flagged and eliminated - and just as routinely new ones are created and carefully fostered with Mesh blogs, subscription channels, etc. Still, the anti-bankstas have succeeded in making rep-banking a moderately disreputable activity, and apt to cause a spate of downvotes to anyone caught using such services.

Using Bonus Point Bank

Rep is a great concept and one of the more terrific ideas in the Eclipse Phase setting. That said, it does depend and require that there be transhumans around in the same network willing to exchange favors with each other, and in some of the extreme locales that player characters find themselves in that's not always a guaranteed situation. That can make for a great additional wrinkle to a scenario as the PC is forced to rely on their own resources (or what they can beg/steal/join another network to get), but sometimes it can be a game killer. The Bonus Point Bank is there to prevent a session from grinding to a sudden halt because the PCs don't have the local currency to keep going - whether it's to buy a vacsuit, rent a vehicle, pay bail, grease the wheels of bureacracy, or any of the million and one other problems that money can solve.

Mechanics

The Bonus Point Bank allows a player character to convert rep directly into credits (or other currency) and vice versa. To 'deposit' monies at the Bonus Point Bank, the PC simply exchanges credits (or other currencies and property); for every 1,000 credits or equivalent their appropriate rep score increases by 1. Any amount of credits can be deposited in this fashion, but the maximum rep that can ever be gained this way is 6 points. To 'withdraw' monies from the Bonus Point Bank, the PC burns rep points equal to the equivalent favor (see Favors table, Eclipse Phase 289) plus 1 (so, a trivial favor would be 0 + 1 = 1, a low favor would be 1 + 1 = 2, etc.) and receive the appropriate amount of credits (or the equivalent in local currency/property) according to the Acquire Services Table (Eclispe Phase 290). Unlike normal favors, there is no refresh rate on these transactions - a PC can continue to burn favors until they have the currency they need or run out of rep.

Example

Daisy Six is in jail in Nova York and needs some fast cash to make bail, which has been set at 1,000 noyos. Making the most of her one Mesh transaction, Daisy contacts the Bonus Point Bank and sets up a 'withdrawal.' Marking off 6 @-rep, the funds deposit into Daisy's account...and Daisy Six is a free transhuman once again.  

Despite the comparison to a bank, the PC does not have an "account" as such and does not need to have deposited monies to withdraw them. At the gamemaster's discretion, player characters that abuse the Bonus Point Bank system may be Blacklisted from the network.

Seed

• Santa-bot has come early this year...an unknown benefactor has deposited funds in the PC's names in the Bonus Point Bank, giving them a healthy 5-point boost in one of their reps. Unfortunately, that turns out to be a bank error in their favor, as a very dangerous-looking gentleperson from the Nine Lives drops in to explain. Of course, this is all a simple misunderstanding and if they can't pay back the money then the PCs are welcome to the rep bonus - but now the Nine Lives want a little favor in return: there's a shipment of plasma rifles heading off the habitat tomorrow and they want one of the crates to quietly end up on a different shipping platform.

298: Gold Ballast

ENTRY 298: Gold Ballast

"Gold is no longer a store of value."
- Opening invocation to the AF 3, 3rd Annual Mass Economist Suicide Convention

The migration of transhumanity from Earth to space has necessitated a reconsideration of the values of many things. Metals that were scarce or difficult to mine from the surface of the Earth are astoundingly plentiful and easily available from asteroid mining - even a relatively small asteroid a few kilometers long with an average metal content of 3% by volume can contain more gold and platinum than has ever been harvested from the surface of the Earth. Of course, few miners are quite so thorough in their pursuit of mineral resources as to process an entire asteroid, aiming instead to pick out the most profitable metal nodes and agglomerations then moving on, but the simple fact remains: gold is fairly cheap, while hydrocarbon compounds and botanicals that cannot be easily mined or manufactured in abundance are precious. Wood is far more costly and rare than gold, though the latter retains sentimental and aesthetic value for jewelry, dental work, some electrical and electronic applications, and so on - but for most of the solar system, gold is most known as the preferred ballast material.

One of the technical requirements for any good spacecraft, satellite, or habitat is ballast - preferrably something dense and inert. While still a commercial good, the relative low cost of gold with relation to its volume makes it an ideal ballast material, and many minecraft contain simple forge equipment to separate gold from the ore slag and cast standardized weights to adjust the center of gravity on their loads. When they reach their destination, the gold masses that cannot be sold are often left behind to save mass on the return trip, and piles of gold spheres, discs, and slugs (often more than slightly radioactive) form common sights in scrapyards.

Of course, the most famous use of gold ballast is in the Starwell gravity tractor, which uses the gravitational field of a massive series of gold weights to adjust the orbit and approach of nearby asteroids without actually touching them. The gravity tractor - which currently consists of up to eighteen 1 kiloton gold slugs stacked together by carbon fiber rods and pushed by an antimatter drive - maneuvers near the target asteroid, and the gravitational forces between the two masses adjust the course of the asteroid. While a delicate operation, the gravity tractor is considered by many inhabitants of Starwell as a key component of asteroid defense and the continued long life of the habitat, and there has been some interest in licensing the design (particularly the targeting and gravimetric software and sensor package) from habitats on Mars, Titan, and Luna.

Using Gold Ballast

The future is not defined by our expectations. Prices in Eclipse Phase are not denoted in any of our national currencies, and there is little reasonable expectation that commercial brands of the current day will make it into space in a recognized form - so why should the rather primitive notion of gold as a shiny, imperishable metal being a cornerstone of economic thought survive into the future? Hell, most economists will tell you straight up that gold isn't that important today. So if you strip away the currency folklore and look at the basics of it, what is gold good for? Well, it's dense, malleable, and relatively abundant - all good qualifications for ballast, and a nice flavor piece to challenge the preconceptions of players that equate gold with money or wealth. This isn't to say that every story with gold has to be an economic fable, but the potential is there if you want to play with it.

Seeds

• The PCs arrive at a small brinker habitat on Mars known as Randtopia, which uses gold coinage for all internal exchanges, reserving credits and other currencies for trade with outsiders. Of course, the PC's are using a fifty-kilogram gold slug as ballast - which as far as the Randtopians are concerned, is a single coin with a greater mass than all the gold they have in circulation. When they learn of it, the government moves to impound the gold ballast before it destabilizes the local economy, but the Randtopians have already learned of it and the resulting speculation has a devastating effect on local prices and markets, not to mention the groups that wish to steal it. How the PCs deal with the situation is up to them, but even extracting themselves from Randtopia might be harder than it looks.
• The Starwell gravity tractor has been stolen by space pirates. Worse, the pirates have made it into a weapon - accelerating up to speed and then releasing one of gold bricks creates a 1 kiloton missile with a lot of inertia. Starwell has been issued an ultimatum: one billion credits and ten kilotons of water-ice or their habitat vanishes in a cloud of gold dust. The PCs, who are not currently on Starwell, are asked to try and infiltrate the ship and activate the antimatter drive's self-destruct sequence.

074: Solnar

ENTRY 074: Solnar

An oldthink economic relic wearing new clothes, the solnar is a unit of account used as a basis for comparison and conversion of the various fiat currencies in use throughout the solar system. Unlike the hypercorp-backed credit or Titanian Kroner, the solnar is not a currency into itself to be spent and accepted in exchange for goods and services, and is of primary interest to economists and academics. For most transhumans, the utility of the Solnar is as a handy reference for dealing with alternative, old-fashioned currencies used in some habitats or issued by smaller hypercorps, banks, governments, and groups. A simple app allows users to quickly calculate the relative worth of various coupons, bonds, scripts, and even physical currency against the solnar.

In most cases, the solnar app also allows near-instantaneous cost-free conversion between digital currencies through the Solnar Fiscal Exchange (SFEX), an autonomous Mesh-based service where users post the currencies they have and the currencies they want, and accept the solnar-based conversion rate; SFEX then matches up user requests and offers through a microtransaction system. While obscure, low-demand currencies can sometimes take minutes or hours to complete conversion, conversions from major currencies to major currencies (Credits to Titanian Kroner, or Night Cartel negotiable digital certificates) are nearly automatic.

Using the Solnar

In the post-scarcity economy that rules much of Eclipse Phase, with so much of the game tied up into the rep-system, old-school economics like differing currencies are such a pain that they are seldom used except as a plot point. That being said, sometimes weird currencies can be a very useful plot point—work certificates for a given habitat encourage the PCs to look (and spend) locally, hypercorp coupons or stock are a very flavorful and specific reward for a certain kind of work—but when the time does come when the PCs (and/or the plot) needs to move on, they’re going to want to take their wealth with them, and that’s where solnars and SFEX come in: a mechanism to ease PCs over the nightmare of currency conversion so they can get on with the adventure and have fun.

Seeds

• Jhim Thrush can’t bank on his reputation, but as a part-owner of three exotic organic compound mining operations around Saturn he issues and redeems his own personal script to cover many transactions, particularly his gambling debts. Jhim relies on the solnar ranking of his script for it to be accepted—and lately that’s been taking a dive, even though Jhim always honors them. Jhim suspects a rival of his, one of the PCs former employers, of trying to discredit him and hires the PCs to investigate.
• The Night Cartel on Liberty station on Ganymede are laundering Titanian kroners from the Jovian government through their legitimate businesses, taking a rake-off and then the proceeds are being set up in a series of autonomous accounts outside Jovian space. Anti-Jovian watchdogs have caught wind of the operation; they aren’t sure what the Jovians intend to do with the money but don’t expect it’s for anything good. They give the PCs a computer virus and ask them to slip it into the computers holding the black accounts—it’ll automatically flag the Kroners as available for trade and fill the accounts up with a variety of low-demand “junk” currencies, digital coupons, etc. Of course, for their efforts the PCs are set up with an account full of junk bonds, which if they succeed will be converted into 10,000 kroner.