Question 102: Banks, Gigayen, and Money Transfers
One of the big problems that comes from the lack of interstellar radio is the difficulty of money transfers, which does make banks very impractical on the interstellar scale. True, nearly every inhabited system in the drift has a bank, but the problem is that there are almost no interstellar banking companies. The biggest ones are between two major trading partners, so they can get cheap mail between the two systems, because of all the transactions. Another roadblock is that differing currencies are all over the place and it's plain impractical to have regular exchange rates between currencies.
The only thing that does work as a banking system is the decentralized networks of credit letterers. Essentially, when making a transaction, if buying party does not have cash on hand, they can provide a letter of credit to the seller, worth a premium to them. The seller generally sells them to credit letterers, at however much they expected to make, who exploit the small-world concept to exchange the letters of credit for hard currency. Surprisingly, this system has yet to run into a collapse, despite the efforts of some econo-terrorists.
The Modern Gigayen is essentially an outgrowth of the Credit Letter concept. In 23rd century Japan, large corporations were faced with the collapsing yen and worked to implement a new currency, which was backed by their assets. The currency became very popular because Japanese banks had owned a great deal of the world's debt at the time, and would accept it as payment for these debts.
After a popular phase, the system was disrupted by the development of interstellar travel, which led to very devaluation of the currency in favor of the chemically bound Thay-D, which required much energy to create, thus giving it its value. The yen was worth a billionth of its value, but was saved when banks stepped in again, stabilizing the conversion rate between Thay-D and the Yen at about 1 billion yen to Thay-D, giving the name Gigayen. The Gigayen became a composite of a number of very important banks credit letters, thus ensuring the value of the currency, especially after breakthroughs in Thay-D synthesis were made.
Question 103: From way back here:
Quote:
Originally Posted by (E)
the Mar Kan trading conglomerate "Yellow Song" is upgrading their fleet all the real space drives will be sold over the next year. Real space reactionless drives are known as Kwem drives. A drifted phonetic version of "Q.M.I" or quantum momentum inducer.
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Why is Yellow song replacing all their real space drives? Is there a problem with the technology?