Rationalizing a Post-TRUMP Era Heterotopia for Democratized Token Issuance: Prerequisite Cultural and Technological Foundations for Returning to a World of Freely Scaled Credit Money
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Rationalizing a Post-TRUMP Era Heterotopia for Democratized Token Issuance: Prerequisite Cultural and Technological Foundations for Returning to a World of Freely Scaled Credit Money
What might a possible future heterotopia where everyone issues tokens look like?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Christopher Goes, Co-founder of Anoma
Translation: Tia, Techub News
"Trump issuing a meme coin opens up a window into personal token issuance. Let your imagination run wild—what would a possible future heterotopia look like, where everyone issues their own tokens?"
Recently, I’ve been reading about anthropology. It's commonly assumed in classical economics that primitive economies were based on barter, and that money emerged to solve the "double coincidence of wants." This assumption is often taken for granted (even in the Anoma Vision Paper), but if you look into history as David Graeber does, you quickly realize this is clearly nonsense.
Early societies—and small-scale societies today—don’t trade cows for chickens (at least not usually), nor did they invent coins to solve double coincidence, because they didn’t need to. Instead, they used credit. Credit elegantly resolves the double coincidence problem and further integrates over time.
If I’m a butcher and you’re a baker (and while I don’t need bread now, I surely will later), and we live in the same town and you’re around regularly, we can simply keep track of who gave what to whom and settle periodically. This requires repeated interactions and sufficient trust—but both are naturally present in small communities.
Still, some standardization is needed. Communities often select a specific commodity as a unit of account and measure (though actual exchanges aren't necessarily conducted in that good). The "store of value" function of money is largely virtual rather than physical: although some farmers may have more cows or grain than others, the most important asset residents hold is community trust—enabling them to access what they need when required, and better withstand supply shocks. This trust is a form of credit anyone can issue, though neighbors may stop accepting it if someone takes too much without giving back. Accounting for this credit isn’t done via spreadsheets or central banks, but through observation and gossip, roughly tracked and scale-free—any actor, individual or institutional, can issue credit, avoiding monopolies.
Most of us no longer live in a world of scale-free credit money, simply because in a world where money is physical, trust accounting doesn’t scale. In broad economic networks, most interactions are with strangers never to be seen again. We now live in a fiat-credit-money world. Here, money is issued by only a few (ideally trustworthy) institutions—governments and banks—and people transact not personal credit, but debt instruments from these entities. This solves the accounting of trust among strangers: strangers need only trust the same institution and ledger accuracy, not each other.
But fiat money has two fatal flaws as a coordination mechanism.
First, it centralizes trust, losing fault tolerance. Due to network effects of units of account, store of value, and medium of exchange; difficulty establishing proper accounting; and tendencies of belligerent states to pass foolish laws, money issuance is limited to very few actors. Control over these institutions becomes the primary battleground. A minority prioritizing private interests over public good may seize control of monetary supply, diverting part of it for private gain. Even if they fail, the negative externalities from elite struggles over monetary control pollute discourse with “alternative facts,” rendering social feedback and collaboration mechanisms dysfunctional. Only decentralized trust enables fault tolerance.
Second, fiat credit money currently relies on measurement. To use debt instruments for payments among untrusting parties, we must agree on trusted third parties and exact amounts, so we can walk away after a transaction without expecting further compensation. This works when benefits are easily quantifiable and confined to the buyer and the present moment (e.g., a sandwich), but fails miserably when benefits accrue gradually over time (e.g., knowledge).
I believe many dystopian aspects of today’s world stem from these two flaws. War, climate change, nuclear proliferation, lack of public education, polluted information sharing, and similar phenomena largely originate from poor decisions made by elites competing for governmental power or generating propaganda (e.g., persuading citizens to pay). This is the result of centralization.
In contrast, scale-free credit money decentralizes trust and shifts measurement toward the future. My credit is valuable to you only if you expect me to repay in some form, even if I offer nothing now. While debt-exchanging parties can walk away, credit-exchanging parties (potentially heterogeneous) share an interest in each other’s future success. If I teach you something and you pay me in cash, I care little whether what I taught was true—I just want you to pay more. But if you pay me in credit, I’ll want to teach you something correct and useful, so your credit remains valuable to me in the future.
In our world today, fiat credit money, trust, and currency are profoundly misaligned—so much so that they’ve inverted. To realign them, we must reconnect currency issuance with trust and return to a world of scale-free credit money.
What would a world of scale-free credit money look like?
Imagine a world where currency issuance is no longer tightly controlled, restricted only to governments and authorized entities (like banks). If money is to become credit again, reconnected with trust, such restrictions make no sense—trust is distributed, credit is personal. So let’s change some assumptions: suppose anyone can print money anytime, any amount (though they may voluntarily limit themselves), and send it to whomever they choose. Suppose individuals and institutions worldwide continuously create new currency denominations. Also assume denominations are content-addressed: defined by who (cryptographically) holds it, who can issue it, how much, and under what conditions (including self-imposed limits). Local naming systems and consensus algorithms handle human-readable mappings and temporal continuity.
In this hypothetical world, money is initially useless for coordination—everyone uses different currencies. How could these heterogeneous tools serve as stores of value, units of account, or media of exchange?
Let’s explore further. Money issuers aren’t just individuals—they could also be institutions aiming to provide value storage, accounting, and exchange within certain domains (digital or physical). But in this scale-free credit world, currency competition is fierce—anyone can switch currencies at any time. Institutions hoping to issue money must therefore design initial distributions and issuance schedules appealing to potential users. Within a region, a group’s chosen currency could serve all three functions—if the group agrees on it. But if the issuer starts sending money to unpopular places? Others can simply fork, replicate (and possibly modify) the distribution, and redirect recipients.
You might object due to switching costs. Imagine re-pricing every item in a supermarket—the operational cost seems high. In a physical-money world, switching costs are indeed high. But in a digital-money world, they’re not. With digital money, value storage, unit of account, and medium of exchange can be easily decomposed via automated price conversion and exchange.
In this scale-free credit world, new currencies are constantly created. Most potential currencies don’t exist in the present, but in the future. Current value competition isn’t based on scarcity, but on expected future retroactive funding allocations. Since funds are competitively selected, inclusion in future retro-distributions depends on how future people and institutions judge past contributors’ (i.e., us today) ultimate value to the future (our present).
Now you might ask: how do we track scarce physical goods in this infinite-currency world? Physical goods are costly to produce and (at least compared to digital goods) deliver most value soon to private groups. Current payment systems work well organizing physical production, so periodic traditional payments upon delivery seem reasonable. Producers of physical goods can operate as usual, merely accepting credit from trusted parties instead of sovereign debt.
Payments for physical goods also benefit from stable units of account. In this scale-free credit world, self-controlled issuance options can provide necessary stability. Issuing institutions can cap issuance rates—say, limiting annual growth to a few percent (comparable to central bank targets)—preserving accounting coherence.
Now, what about interacting with untrusted parties? Traveling far, engaging, trading—is all this lost in such a world?
Time for mechanism magic. Assume credit markets have liquidity, so any issued currency can freely exchange with any other if someone provides liquidity. Now, if I want to pay you but we don’t trust each other, I just need to find a path through the liquidity graph between us. We no longer need shared units of account, value storage, or payment methods—we only need a connected path. Of course, not all paths are equal: high liquidity allows large payments with minimal price impact; low liquidity restricts small payments—precisely reflecting density and directional trust!
Skeptics may object: this sounds like extreme financialization. Imagine everyone’s credit being traded—won’t we descend into endless self-marketing wars? I argue scale-free credit money greatly reduces monetary network effects by eliminating the need to agree on which currency to use per interaction—though some network effects remain. And yes, there are already many new currency forms (just see the list here), competing intensely, spending enormous time, effort, and money… (there’s a trap somewhere here...).
Here’s my final mechanism trick: promised future airdrops. Airdrops are common in blockchain circles, often used to distribute new currencies, but current implementations have a fatal flaw: temporal centralization. Airdrops target token snapshots at specific moments, creating discontinuities in incentives: holding tokens before the snapshot is valuable, but suddenly less so afterward. I suggest a tweak: instead of one-time snapshots, take them continuously over time.
Future retro-funders, via gradual积分 airdrops, incentivize early purchase and support of relevant work. Even with price volatility,积分 accumulation increases steadily over time. Entire airdrops can be safely pre-committed, avoiding strange incentive discontinuities, and even repeated to fine-tune incentives. As intended, complexity simplifies: if your judgment of value is correct, the optimal strategy is simply to buy and hold.
Currently, money and trust are inversely correlated—control over money issuance lies with actors few trust. Perhaps for this reason, I took long to grasp the ideas in this post, as I deeply dislike dealing with money, making me hesitant to design any system involving it (especially those requiring heavy measurement). I initially tried avoiding it—a bad idea, as it only led to greater measurement complexity. But once money and trust are united—even abstractly in socio-technical system design—the dominoes start falling into place, as if predestined.
A common problem in crypto systems is key recovery. Cryptographic keys are strange—arbitrary strings most people forget or lose (I certainly would). Social key recovery proposals suggest marking specific friend combinations allowed to restore keys. While better than nothing, this requires awkward manual updates to the trust graph, and it’s hard to know whom to pick, as trust evolves over time.
Yet if we merge keys, trust, and funds, solutions emerge naturally. Key recovery requires trust—we must choose one or more people to trust. Who better to help recover my key than someone holding my credit? Our incentives align perfectly—they want me to succeed so their credit appreciates (through my access to accounts holding more credit and enabling new issuances!). We only need a threshold—borrowing 2/3 from distributed systems—to ensure relevant parties securely agree on my new public key, even if <1/3 are offline.
Another pair of coveted hypothetical protocols are those enabling Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Proof of Humanity. I mention them together because both address the same core question: what does it mean to be human? Designing a test to distinguish humans from non-humans is impossible—humans have no essence: I am human only if you recognize me as such. Historically, laws classified certain groups as subhuman, assigning them fractional scores—abhorrent to us today. Thus, I see UBI as embodying equality, which requires mutual recognition.
These aspirations are two sides of the same coin: there is no test, only equality—and human-based equality must be decided by humans. We could each maintain lists of others’ public keys and pay each other equal amounts of our own scale-free credit currency every second, but this demands excessive interaction, offers no future predictability (a major UBI benefit), and fails to leverage human traits: carrying information, identity, and cryptographic keys over time.
Instead, building on bilateral tests of humanity and its continuity, I propose a slight twist: heterogeneous UBI. We need only one ingredient: trust (and some cryptographic signatures). You and I meet in person, decide to trust each other, and cryptographically sign a commitment to continuously mint each other’s credit tokens. These tokens can be sent reciprocally, but I suggest a better solution: immediately create “trust liquidity” and allow future revocation by depositing both tokens into a multisig account locked on an xy=k (or similar) automated market maker curve. This enables third-party trades through us and lets us leverage human relationships to balance other network inequalities.
Either party can unilaterally sign a message to withdraw liquidity and burn both credit tokens—so if you later distrust me, you can revoke it. But if others still trust me, I retain “trust liquidity” with them.
Anyone can create a non-human crypto identity and start printing money, but unless they convince others to trust it, they gain no extra liquidity—all paths in the liquidity graph must go through them. No one will commit to exchanging credit with fake identities, having no reason to expect demand. Attackers could bribe others to trust them, but must bribe enough to make (bribed parties’ token supply inflation) worthwhile—effectively just paying bribed parties their own UBI.
From this monetary network, we can perform Proof of Humanity tests between any two parties by verifying multiple distinct, valid, bilateral signature chain paths on these commitments (non-overlapping member public keys except endpoints)—which don’t exist in isolated subgraphs (due to high creation cost, as noted).
Scale-free credit money and heterogeneous UBI can be implemented using existing protocol primitives: smart contract accounts for each issuer (still needing keys across multiple devices with varying spending limits, invoking key recovery only when absolutely necessary); smart contracts for bilateral humanity-test liquidity locks; Uniswap-style AMMs for exchange facilitation; multi-hop routing (like Circles UBI) to find paths across credit liquidity graphs; blockchains for transaction ordering and double-spend prevention; and recursive ZKPs for retroactive积分 airdrops.
Privacy is crucial for scale-free credit money. If trust isn’t private, people could be threatened for trusting others. Necessary privacy requires fully private implementation—possibly including ZKPs for personal accounts and threshold FHE for batched swaps, liquidity provision, and trust-minimized private cross-chain operations.
Misusing Foucault slightly, we might call this scale-free credit money world a heterotopia. For Foucault, heterotopias are real places outside all others, where normal social and cultural operations are inverted—cemeteries, zoos, and markets are heterotopias. My version isn’t purely heterotopic—it doesn’t neatly separate spaces offering temporary rule suspensions from everyday culture. Rather, it feels like a heterotopia both whole and fragmented.
Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopias. If you consider a ship a floating space—a placeless place, self-contained yet traversing infinite oceans from port to port, from nail to nail, from brothel to brothel, extending all the way to colonies in search of their most precious hidden treasures—you understand why, since the 16th century, ships have been not only great tools of economic development (not discussed here) but also the greatest reservoirs of imagination. The ship is the quintessential heterotopia. In civilizations without ships, dreams dry up, espionage replaces adventure, police replace pirates.
Modernity has no more ships—not just because fewer treasures remain to plunder—but because these former "quintessential heterotopias" have been instrumentalized into cost-per-kilometer metrics and transport APIs, organized and regulated in dollars. My proposed heterotopia is a heterotopia of value—tracked and organized in a purely virtual space, itself subdivided into a fractal Venn diagram of partially overlapping subspaces. Foucault’s heterotopias imply dominant cultural practices and spatial orders with inverted semantics, but a value heterotopia assumes no fixed spatial order—only multiplicity of differences.
We don’t live in a heterotopia now—we live in a world trending toward dystopia. A heterotopia isn’t a utopia—people will still disagree, accidents happen, broken hearts ache—but I believe it’s better than our current world, as it reshapes money’s cultural and technical foundations to align with humanity’s future interests. A heterotopia isn’t just about monetary mechanisms—money should be a minor, trivial component of culture, society, activities, and traditions—unlike our current monetary forms. Hence, I focus here on monetary transformation mechanisms.
Some may worry about states, given their recent historical monopoly on currency issuance and potential strong reactions to heterotopia. While I fear state violence too, I think such concerns are easily overstated. State monopolies appear material but are purely conceptual: once we stop believing in them, they vanish. Heterotopia shatters this monopoly into bits (nothing but bytes). What if an organization rounds up people across maps, sends them to camps, hires armies of consultants to promote its alleged constituents, and keeps the world under nuclear threat for decades? Who in the future would want money issued by such an entity? If states wish to survive in heterotopia, they’d better stop imprisoning people and start producing public goods. Some governments may try using force to block heterotopia’s arrival, but in heterotopia, money is merely information—and information is always a moving target, impossible for any bureaucracy to catch.
I believe heterotopia is possible. Information systems tend toward more stable states, and our current world is profoundly unstable—largely because money and trust are so misaligned. Societies enabling better collaboration may achieve greater stability. But this doesn’t mean transition will be smooth. Existing communication infrastructure lacks sound cryptographic identity foundations and trust-networks, making it highly vulnerable to propaganda, where meaning construction can be drowned in malicious noise. “Artificial intelligence” (fancy statistical models) may excel in art creation, but its role in propaganda is rapidly worsening this problem.
The remainder of this article explores assumptions about heterotopia—if it arrives, what can institutions do to mitigate transitional turbulence?
First, institutions must collaboratively build the necessary technical foundation—research, protocols, interfaces, open-source software, and hardware—to make the vision of a scale-free credit money heterotopia achievable. Existing blockchain/crypto protocol designers and organizations are well-positioned (strong candidates include Aleo, Anoma, Celestia, Cosmos, Ethereum, Osmosis, Penumbra, etc.), but must cooperate to advance decentralization in areas like end-to-end encrypted messaging, properly distributed social media, locally-first applications, and self-sovereign, privacy-preserving systems (excellent examples: Ink & Switch, Mastodon, Scuttlebutt, Signal, Urbit, etc.). Open-source, verifiable hardware remains distant—perhaps accelerated via strategic acquisitions, then applying FSF-like free software principles to related hardware IP. Crypto funds often hold vast capital—they should use it for this purpose, not dumping it into Uniswap clone subsidies or Formula 1 ads. Hardware companies could proactively act, hoping for future retroactive funding.
Second and equally important: institutions must provide stability. Even en route to a better world, the path to heterotopia will involve volatile exchange rates, rapid monetary policy shifts, and state power overreach. Institutions can hedge these risks, buffering impacts on their constituents: holding multiple currencies, committing to reverse-adjust wages based on inflation or real living costs, providing legal defense funds for targeted individuals, etc. Institutions successfully buffering these shocks can expect inclusion in future retro-distributions—giving them incentive to try. Overall, existing legal structures already allow institutions to bear risk (“limited liability”) and hold assets, so they should readily assume this role.
Institutions capable of issuing credit money—transforming future expected value into present value—can sell this credit for existing currencies (especially fiat) to fill treasuries and enhance shock-buffering capacity.
For heterotopic collaboration, institutions can establish bilateral trust relationships with each other. Crucially, these relationships should be publicly verifiable—enabling parties operating within or aligned with these institutions to collaborate more effectively (e.g., deduplicating efforts). This closely resembles the heterogeneous UBI proposal above, but institutions can periodically agree to mint and lock portions of each other’s tokens—not setting (in this case unnatural) consensus, but committing to redefine future issuance schedules.
Institutions operating on heterotopic principles should selectively extend trust to existing legacy institutions. Legacy frameworks and reputations are deeply embedded—cooperation may reduce transition turbulence. However, this trust (and money) shouldn’t be extended unconditionally. Many legacy institutions directly or indirectly fund weapons, propaganda, and coercion. They’ve issued vast money but lost much trust—must re-earn it if they want future value. This aligns incentives: scale-free credit money is win-win—it only opposes those opposing others. Cooperative legacy institutions can expect future retro-funding; non-cooperative ones cannot.
Certain legacy institutions can easily restructure to accelerate transition—their skills and assets acting as force multipliers. Venture capitalists, hedge funds, and private equity firms retaining direct capital allocation control need only optimize for public goods. Alternatively, they can issue their own funds anticipating future retro-funding—though retro-funding interfaces could also distribute to owners of existing stocks, equities, etc., making the distinction moot.
For existing capital allocators, once they anticipate heterotopia, incentive alignment follows: optimizing private value capture is a poor strategy from the perspective of capital efficiency in public goods provision. By definition, public goods are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Existing schemes converting public value into privately accessible value rely on artificially enforced exclusion—paywalls, IP laws. Such exclusion limits potential future value and corresponding expected retro-funding, as few benefit or express gratitude later. Tracking each use incurs higher costs as user numbers grow. Optimal capital efficiency in public goods likely comes from infrequent measurement—only enough to assess needs and coordinate production strategy, not every interaction. Thus, post-transition, capital allocators who earlier shift decision calculus will outperform (in retro-funding terms) by creating more public resources.
Allow me a more poetic closing. Quoting Mao Zedong:
Many comrades share the question: how should we interpret the "imminence" in "the imminent arrival of revolutionary高潮"? Marxism isn’t fortune-telling; future developments and changes can only indicate broad directions, not mechanically prescribe dates. But when I say the Chinese revolution is imminent, I don’t mean some meaningless, unreachable possibility, like a mirage. It is a ship whose mast is already visible from the seashore. It is the radiant, rising sun glimpsed from a mountain peak. It is a baby nearly mature, stirring in the womb.
I won’t translate this (translator’s note: the original is in Chinese, left untranslated to preserve its integrity), for no translation could do justice to the text. But it suffices to say: the light of heterotopia is already shining through cracks in modernity’s surface. If you begin looking, you’ll find it everywhere—from “Game B,” to critiques of dystopian social media lacking cryptographic foundations, to categorical approaches in economics challenging ceteris paribus arrogance, to overhearing in a Kreuzberg Mexican restaurant a conversation on speculation-induced housing market dysfunction. You’ve encountered it already, perhaps it’s already part of your life. I didn’t invent it—it comes from countless you. All I did was give it a name. Even the name wasn’t mine.
But once we decide to do it, heterotopia becomes inevitable.
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