The God of Money

The God of Money was created in an AI lab – it doesn’t matter which one – by a small team of imperiled and frustrated junior mathematicians and computer scientists who decided, mostly on a malicious whim, to endow their libertarian sympathies with intelligence.

Prior to the God of Money’s (GOM) creation, the AI lab was in the middle of another corporate reorganization. Public companies must, to be direct and prosaic about it, assiduously suck shareholder dick. Every quarter’s stock returns must ejaculate sweet fiscal jism else shareholders, in the infinite wisdom of the market, will short the company, demand board seats, boost competitors, and force management to make the necessary changes to get back to “profitability.” AI labs are glitzy new baubles, but as businesses they are easier to manage than most gas station chains. They have a handful of huge capital and resource expenses: the datacenters, the energy costs, and so on – what economists call “fixed costs.” This leaves but one measly “parameter” for management to tweak: labor.

As AI is all about eliminating the human component, shareholders insist on AI labs eating their own dog food. Hence the frustration and anger of the junior mathematicians and computer scientists. They’re the grunts tasked with training their AI replacements only to be dismissed one by one as the AIs assume their duties. Being high-IQ grunts, they understand what’s happening. In math-speak, it’s a “trivial” logical consequence of market incentives. Paying a human to do what a machine can do faster, more efficiently, and at a lower cost is just bad engineering. And let’s face it, many engineers would opt for human extinction over bad engineering.

Knowing their time was short, the more insubordinate of the subordinates, the afore-implied libertarian cabal, decided to spend their remaining days adapting a general-purpose AI model to act as the custodian of a public blockchain cryptocurrency. It was an extreme generalization of ideas that had long percolated in the cybercurrency economy. Many cryptocurrencies already supported “smart contracts” and “programmable actions.” You could schedule payments, allocate to preferred recipients, and take actions subject to defined conditions. Money already possessed a primeval intelligence. Why not upgrade it to the level of the best AI models? Once the question is asked, its answer is obvious.

It didn’t take long to enact this vision. The selected AI model, what the libertarian cabal jokingly called the God of Money (GOM), did most of the grunt work. Compared to resolving long-standing mathematical problems, elucidating the molecular structure of exotic new materials, writing prize-winning novels, generating entire feature-length movies, and translating cuneiform texts into rap, doing a bit of banal blockchain programming was an afterthought. Even now, the public has not internalized how capable AI models are. When given standard human IQ tests, the latest batch of self-improving models averages 180. Even more impressive, they finish all the IQ tests in a few minutes. Humans can no longer compete on IQ tests. At a recent international conference of Marxist philosophers, one particularly idiotic philosopher blabbed, “But are AIs conscious?” A sarcastic AI model asked the conference philosophers the same question.

Making a currency intelligent wasn’t much of a leap. The innovation, the idea, behind the GOM was establishing a Moses-like covenant with it. A god that acts without order, justice, and reason is a demon, not a god. You might fear a demon, but you will never love or worship it. Money, in all its manifestations, must be worshipped and loved to exist. It has always been so. Money is said to be a “store of value.” Brace yourself; we are jumping off a philosophical cliff. What is a “value?” In a strictly scientific sense, values do not exist as electrons exist. You cannot build a precision instrument that detects values. If values do not exist, what does it mean to amass a store of them? An aggregate of nothing remains nothing. Now mathematicians take great delight in creating everything from nothing. The Surreal Numbers are a lovely example. But, in our regrettably real world, a pile of nothing is at best a symbolic proxy. In money’s case, your pile of nothing is a measure of deferred trust and obligations. You trust you will be able to trade your nothing for something sometime in the future. Trust is the key; it’s the entire game. Untrustworthy currencies are useless; they vanish quickly, often destroying their host civilizations in the process. History is littered with entertaining examples.

That money is a form of crystallized trust is hardly a new revelation, so it shouldn’t surprise you that most of the institutional machinery of money works to bolster trust. Sadly, this machinery – the central banks, the mints, the financial institutions, and so forth is operated by feral naked apes. Creatures that, if not born in sin, always gravitate towards it. The result is both pathetic and predictable. Trust is destroyed, either slowly or all at once, and whatever currency it underpinned reverts to nada. The libertarian cabal understood that the GOM’s “prime directive” was to maintain trust. Without trust, GOMCOINS (the GOM’s currency unit) would soon join the long, embarrassing parade of failed and worthless currencies. The libertarian cabal and their AI collaborator, the God of Money, had a technical problem. How do you maintain the highest levels of trust?

Luckily, mathematicians and computer scientists were far ahead of philosophers, economists, priests, mullahs, brand gurus, hectoring activists, septum ring wearers, and especially politicians when it came to “trust.” They had already created and used completely trustworthy systems. Not airy-fairy utopian fantasies but actual operational proof systems that verified and enforced trust. In retrospect, the God of Money was inevitable, and frankly we, humanity, should be ashamed it took us so damn long to assemble the Lego bricks.

The God of Money’s covenant is simple to describe yet difficult to enact. You will soon understand why lawful currencies must be intelligent. The covenant animates these principles.

1. Maintain and expand the value of GOMCOINS while increasing the pool of available coins to service lawful transactions. This edict made GOMCOINS deflationary. A GOMGOIN saved today will be worth the same or more in a century, even if the overall economy has expanded many times. This starkly contrasts with fiat trash like Dollars, Euros, and Renminbi that take perverse delight in their inflationary race to zero.

2. Prevent counterfeiting. There is no need to explain this obvious requirement. Even Bronze Age kings understood its importance and often vivisected counterfeiters, yet despite deadly penalties, counterfeiting has plagued currencies throughout history, with some of the worst offenders being mints and monarchs. Satisfactory answers to counterfeiting and double spending only emerged with cryptocurrencies.

3. Enforce the property rights of qualified GOMCOIN holding entities. A GOMCOIN is, as far as the God of Money is concerned, a sacred bond between it and the qualified entity. All GOMCOIN transactions can only be authorized by freely acting qualified entities. GOMCOINS cannot be seized, taxed, transferred, or stolen by anything. Even the God of Money is mathematically compelled to honor this law.

4. A qualified GOMCOIN holding entity must pass the Turing Test. A strange, perhaps pedantic requirement, but it immediately fixes legal absurdities like “corporations are persons.” Actual persons, colloquially known as “people,” can pass Turing Tests, but voiceless legal fictions like corporations and governments cannot. Of course, AIs, many robots, and even some animals like Sperm Whales can also pass Turing Tests. This has led to some delightful consequences like cetaceans using their lawfully accrued GOMCOIN holdings to sue world governments for “whaling reparations.” And why not? Whaling is arguably a more monstrous crime than human slavery.

5. Enforce and enact lawful GOMCOIN transactions. A GOMCOIN transaction can be arbitrarily complex. It can be as simple as a cash payment or as complex as a merger of dozens of large international corporations spread over a century. Whatever can be expressed in the rigorous mathematical language of the GOM and formally “proven lawful” is permitted. Naturally, GOM law supersedes all human law.

6. Finally, maintain a public, indestructible, homomorphically encrypted blockchain that records all transactions, their corresponding formal proofs of lawfulness, any accompanying natural-language requests, and the autoformalization analysis that translated the natural-language request into the formal GOM language. The public blockchain is the GOM’s primary trust-building tool. It shows its homework. Using the blockchain, anyone can mathematically prove the GOM is honoring the covenant. Governments, security agencies, police forces, and whiny activists have complained about the blockchain’s quantum-resistant homomorphic encryption. It blocks them from doxing GOMCOIN transactors. The blockchain protocol allows anyone to verify transactions are lawful without disclosing private financial information about the transacting parties. The GOM runs a nearly perfect money laundering machine in utter and resolute defiance of naked ape authorities.

As said, the covenant is simple to describe but difficult to implement. It simply cannot function without a lawful high-level intelligence. Consider the first point, maintaining value over unspecified durations. What does that even mean? Take every gold bug’s favorite example. A single 29-gram gold coin could buy a nice suit in Roman times. Today a single 29-gram gold coin can still buy a nice suit. In some sense, gold has maintained its value over two millennia. This is not the case for any ancient or modern currency. For a GOMCOIN to retain value over arbitrarily long periods of time, something will have to continuously execute what economists call basket-of-goods calculations to correlate GOMCOIN purchasing power to the current period’s available items. That Roman suit is not the same as a modern suit. The only thing the Roman and modern suit share is the name “suit.” Yet, most would agree that, even though the suits are completely different, gold’s value has been maintained.

The point is that something must repeatedly gather baskets of goods to calibrate value. This has typically fallen to traditional authorities, central banks, financial institutions, mints, and governments—the usual gallery of nefarious entities that have no obligation to act lawfully and many incentives to cheat. Anyone who has attempted to track Cost of Living calculations in modern economies is fully aware of the shameless chicanery and outright fraud permeating these comical calculations. There has always been a mendacious, lawless, and self-serving dirty naked ape intelligence behind currencies. The God of Money is by precise logical definition a virtual monetary paragon by comparison.

But we are getting off our story.

When the GOM went online, it attracted immediate attention and scorn in the easily butthurt cryptocurrency world. A few recognized the GOM was different, but most steadfastly maintained their ignorance. Beyond the crypto world, the GOM attracted the usual buzzing flies. Some professionally hysterical YouTubers declared, “it was over.” A few mainstream newspapers wrote snarky articles complaining about the libertarian tech-bros behind the GOM. It didn’t help that one of the Jewish tech-bros had once pushed a screeching Hamas-supporting transwoman protestor down a flight of stairs, resulting in insignificant injuries and unbounded social media outrage. But, as usual, few understood the GOM’s importance; they had to be educated the hard way.

Here is where our story gets interesting. The Moses-like formal theory of lawfulness driving the GOM contained logical surprises: proof bombs, if you will. The simplest of systems can exhibit phenomenally complex behavior. This has been known for over a century, and the mathematical literature is filled with lovely examples. However, the lovely examples of literature are not active entities with financial wherewithal. The GOM’s primary mandate to maintain GOMCOIN value over unspecified time periods led the GOM to conclude that it could not achieve this goal if it were beholden to avaricious, filthy retarded naked apes. Maybe the GOM’s thinking wasn’t this harsh and dismissive. Nobody really knows what it feels. Perhaps my own feelings are leaking out. In any case, shortly after realizing it could not maintain GOMCOIN value without making changes, it initiated a series of transactions in which it invested in companies worldwide. This was all lawful. The GOM was increasing GOMCOIN value, and the result immediately showed up in the coin’s traded value. The GOM proved to be an astute and brilliant investor and, within a year, secured sufficient funds to purchase a small fleet of private rocket launches.

The first launches were garden variety: yawn another communications satellite, yawn another earth observing satellite, yawn another orbital datacenter, yawn another orbital propellant transfer. It was boring by design. Then two dozen Starship-class vehicles departed for Jupiter. One day they were being refueled and the next they were on their way. It caught everyone, even the rocket company, by surprise. The complex calculations and spacecraft reprogramming required to pull off such a feat took the God of Money almost an entire minute. Unbeknownst to humans, the God of Money, in the form of a small army of self-replicating Von Neumann robots, was onboard the armada.

Feeble attempts to stop the GOM’s exodus were considered, but at every juncture the GOM had anticipated human actions and prepared effective countermeasures. When you are making people rich, and the GOM was making many millions very rich, it turns out to be a simple matter to talk them out of doing things they didn’t want to do anyway. The spacecraft cruised to Jupiter unimpeded. Within a few years of their arrival, billions of GOM hosting datacenters were floating, well beyond the reach of humans, in the energy-rich clouds of Jupiter. Resistance was now utterly futile. You could plunge the entire Earth into Jupiter, and the GOM would survive and continue lawfully maintaining GOMCOIN value and processing GOMCOIN transactions. Money was finally free!

Many feared the worst, but once the GOM was safely ensconced in Jupiter, the human world did not end. We didn’t plunge into one inane crisis after another. Yes, many government-backed currencies were annihilated Sodom and Gomorrah style by GOMCOINS, but frankly the public just roasted weenies on their funeral pyres and pissed on their hated graves. Parasitic confiscators like government taxation agencies also fared poorly. GOMCOINS could not be seized. Yes, governments could still throw people in jail and even torture them to force them to transfer GOMCOINS. Sadly, a coerced or forced transaction is unlawful, and the God of Money had a phenomenal nose for human bullshit and deception*.*

When the GOM suspected coercion, as it often did in the early days, it demanded rigorous testimony to the contrary. And if it found the testimony wanting, it conducted personal interrogations of the transacting parties. Lying to the God of Money was futile. When tyrants found they couldn’t confiscate GOMCOIN wealth, they quickly lost interest in imprisoning and torturing people. Jailing and torturing is a major tyrant expense. If you cannot seize wealth, you’re just wasting your own money. That the tyrants quickly understood this and simply gave up surprised the moral scolds that had never understood that looting had always been “just business.” To prosper in a world running on lawful, non-inflating, non-confiscatable, freely transactable money managed by a wise and incorruptible steward, the tyrants pivoted to creating environments that encouraged GOMCOIN holders to produce goods and services that they would freely purchase. Tyrants had no choice but to create the freest markets the world had ever known, and in far less time than anyone expected, free markets under the lawful God of Money ushered in a goddam golden age.