Karma Currency
it started as a way of living, and turned into something amazing.
Chapter 10. The Great Last Battle
America was having one heck of a time getting China from taking over the country. The problem wasn't that their submarines were attacking our soil- it was that their goods were becoming tainted. And we were so reliant on Chinese imports, which at first seemed cheap, until we realized that was only due to that in the beginning, we had more wealth from having a better GNP.
Thus the great battle began. China came knocking on our financial door. At first, they insisted we pay them back with cash. We told them that we could print all the money in the world, but it would devalue their own currency to a point where it wouldn't present the rest of the world with much buying power. We tried to make them forget it. We attempted to sweep the whole thing under the rug, but they dragged it out, covered in dust and everything else from being swept.
We couldn't get rid of this debt thing with China. Finally, all the young american legions of elitists started to agree that the Fed should just print the cash and ship it over to China. Here you go, fellas. Five trillion dollars, in cash, as promised.
The money was printed on cheap American paper. The kind that disintegrates when you look at it funny. It was also printed on denominations of single one dollar bills. It took the equivolent of five oil tankers to ship five trillion pieces of 2 by 5 *rough estimate* pieces of paper. When it arrived, the Chinese burned the ships in their own harbor and took the crews captive, then let them into Chinese society and allowed them to live as McDonalds workers.
Next, they unleashed the great Google hack they had been working on. But once Google realized there was nothing they could do to stop the hack, they began building a backup server, which was basically a giant Apple Time Machine for the entire internet. When the Chinese hackers successfully deleted 2/3 of Google, the backup version came online and now Google had a sample of the Chinese super-computer virus. It would be very difficult for Chinese technology then to devise an entirely new approach. The element of surprise was gone.
And information was still flowing. Americans still knew what was going on. Sort of. But the internet caused great confusion because the news that it reported was all very conflictory. One station showed it one way. And another station showed it another. Everyone thought they knew what was going on, but couldn't understand why the rest of the nation seemed so confused.
They were confused because we were under attack from bad products. And we were so broke because there was no wealth. Even the wealthy people were having difficulty spending their money because there were no interesting products on the market. Even the market itself became smaller, and there was less stuff to buy. There were fewer builders, making structures like houses, apartments, condos, and hotels; places they enjoyed.
With fewer jobs for normal people to make a living, and fewer services available to the people who didn't have to make a living and could afford whatever they wanted, the conflict of interest became infintely more acute.
So the homeless and unemployed proposed a solution.