Alchemy and Goldfish

Let's start the extraordinary alchemy journey.

"But he hasn't got anything on yet!", a little child said. - The Emperor's New Clothes

We are living in a Truman Show piled up by debts that are gradually losing credit. After the evolution of rare material, precious metal, and gold standard currency, credit money for decades emerged as the first medium in human history that can continuously collect taxes, invisible and acceptable, regardless of national boundaries.

Credit money is good. Just like the US Dollar, it embodies almost everything we want from a value medium at the same time, which is easy to carry, combinable with different specifications, highly anti-counterfeit, extremely saleable, and can build consensus among people as well. It has so many advantages that it can break down all cultural, religious and conceptual barriers. - We all love it.

However, what we all don't mention is that actually credit money breaks through the decentralized nature of money, empowering human beings to create value out of thin air for the first time. If the US government paid $10 million for a dinner party, it would be as if they did so with the value generated by people, using the coinage and unlimited trading rights granted them by people indeed.

The tradability, stability, and effectiveness of the credit monetary system all rely on people's confidence in it and the confidence of others in which. Open modern financial theories, turn on financial channels, and everyone is talking about confidence.

Confidence is definitely fine as well, which can gather people's strength, and enable us to build the Tower of Babel. But, vice versa, confidence can also be like a plague, which can easily turn into panic and then quickly devour everything bathed in its light.

Goldfish - BONFire Fairy Tales

The human monetary system is like a goldfish, which needs food (money) to survive (finance and market order).

The gold standard currency is just like its indigent owner, which means that the goldfish may get hungry (such as the socio-economic problems caused by deflation in Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, which mostly contributed to the beginning of the Age of Discovery). This is because our ability to discover and mine precious metals cannot be improved rapidly enough to meet actual market demand. Moreover, people's expectations of world development and the Matthew Effect of the distribution system will also make the gold standard currency in circulation in need of repeated wars and wealth redistribution before it can be released again.

While credit money is like a Replicator (Star Trek), so the goldfish (human monetary system) no longer has to worry about starvation (deflation and the resulting war & wealth redistribution). At the beginning, it followed the instructions, generating food only according to its own needs, and growing because of good nutrition.

But as the goldfish's body continues to grow, its brain is no longer rational due to excessive nutrition, and its body gradually needs to press the generation key more times to meet its own needs.

The goldfish eats, gets fat, and wants to eat more. The goldfish eats more, gets more fat, and wants to eat more and more...

So, how long will it take before the goldfish bursts through its tank and dies of dehydration, or feeds itself hysterically to death?