Not all traders were taking Galactic Credits.

That was consistently a problem whenever cards and virtual currencies replaced cash in human society.

In tech business terms, this is called adoption.

In financial terms, there's a slightly fancier name for the people who didn't have an account: the unbanked. In modern banking, it is sometimes used as a more politically correct synonym for "poor".

Unfortunately for Galactic Credits, adoption was low, and the unbanked were the vast majority of traders.

In a human financial system, the way that banks solved this problem eventually was through incentives. Other than simply being convenient, credit cards were exclusive and gave off a feel of luxury. It made people feel richer than they are. But what really drove adoption over the edge was spamming them to everyone through the mail and promising they'd get discounts and money for using them.

Also unfortunately for Galactic Credits, the alien traders that used it didn't feel luxurious and rich. Instead, they had a sneaking suspicion that they were being ripped off by the humans. They just weren't sure how.

Some, like Zikzik, saw the convenience benefits, but the galactic aversion to debt and taboo of anything more advanced than a barter system counterbalanced with their innate businessbeings' need for efficiency.

Sarah had no idea why. All she knew was that only a quarter of the traders coming in were open to using Galactic Credits, and new traders were coming in every day. She can't go down to the spaceport, set up a booth, and try to talk every new merchant into ignoring all their financial instincts to adopt GCs!

This was unsustainable.

It was time to get an expert. They needed someone who could help resolve the problem and get more traders on board.

She'd found him on social media.

Dr. Max Stearns had struck it rich working at an early fin-tech startup, got bought out by Bank of America, and then retired at 35. He came out of retirement to teach graduate level Economics classes at a local college, and then somehow fumbled his way into a Professor position. Darn it, he was just here to not be bored out of his mind, not get a second wind in his career as an academic at age 50!

For a profession that was increasingly favoring non-tenured instructors over professors, it was a testament to how much they wanted to keep him there. It turns out he was almost as good at explaining things to students as he was at designing financial systems.

So, when Sarah, who was most definitely not a student though she could probably pass as one if she wanted to, came to his predictably empty office hours, he thought maybe she was lost. After the initial confusion, apology, and introduction, Sarah started explaining her problem.

In short, aliens have an extreme reluctance to adopt credits, blah blah blah.

Normally, Stearns was thinking, people would be charging for this. But like all nerds who know a good problem when they see one, he couldn't resist tackling it. He was nerd-sniped.

"You actually have two problems," he began, "first, your system isn't worthy of trust. Your company is non-sustainable and everyone knows it. The other human traders bought into it because they know they wouldn't risk much by doing it. As you can see in these charts you're showing me, they're immediately converting their GCs back into cash. And when they want credits because they've agreed generally to use it, they come back to you, buy GCs with cash, and then immediately use them on the traders."

"The human traders are well aware of your position, but they're temporarily using the system because it is far, far more convenient than barter. Unfortunately, the alien traders don't have that intuition. You're being kept afloat now by selling and trading goods, not by your business of being a financial firm," Stearns continued.

"I've thought about starting to charge the other human traders a fee to keep the business sustainable," Sarah explained, "but wouldn't that drive them away?"

"No. In fact, judging by what you're saying because the transaction costs of bartering is so high, the benefits the human side derives would keep them there even if you charged what would normally be considered absurdly high fees. This is one of those very few cases where charging people money might actually make them more likely to use your business!" Stearns replied. Then, he made a rough waving gesture with his hands. "I need to see more details and there needs to be an iterative process to build a model, but I suspect you would keep almost all of your human traders even if you charged a fee as high as about 20% for each transaction."

"Twenty percent!" Sarah yelped, "that sounds like an exorbitant fee! Wouldn't they just start another currency system?"

"Hah, it's an estimate, and you probably don't have room to lose any human trader right now. But no, they can't replace you. They'll face the exact same problems you face now. If they try to replace you, they'll also have to deal with the fact that they've just discredited your credits system. In fact, the aliens will probably trust them even less."

"Ok, I'll think about adding a fee structure for the humans," Sarah said thoughtfully, "what was the other problem you were going to mention?"

"Your second problem is actually an opportunity. Every functional economic system is a system of incentives and disincentives. The only incentive you're giving the aliens to switch to your credits is one they clearly don't understand. You need to provide incentives they do understand. Or, in this case, maybe disincentives if they don't switch."

"Like what? Get the spaceport to ban them from trading if they don't recognize GC?" Sarah asked.

"Nothing that extreme. And if you did that, I suspect they would simply meet up in orbit and exchange goods there. Without money, it won't be efficient for them, but for some, it would be an acceptable alternative. No, you'd need to provide them a more soft touch but clear disincentive that they understand when trading without GCs to drive them away from barter."

"Can you give me an example?" Sarah asked.

"Ah this is where I normally start charging an hourly consulting fee," Stearns smiled but made a dismissive wave as Sarah began the motion of pulling out a wallet, "but I think I'd rather have a stake in this. A bit of your company and the opportunity to go into space and see what I suspect is about to happen there if your little venture succeeds. Think about it, and let me know."

"I'll be in my office."

Sarah and Jen split the company evenly four ways: one for each of them, one for Benny and Junior combined, and one for Stearns. It was incredibly generous, they knew. Normally, the first few startup employees would get up to one or two percent of the firm, but this was a financial company without anyone with financial experience, and they'd owe it to Benny that they'd gotten their start.

After all, it didn't matter how big their portion of the pie was, if the pie was zero. And that's what their pie was right now: a big fat zero. It didn't make any money; it facilitated some of their food trades and ensured they got more profits there, sure, but it required them to be constantly recruiting and cutting into their time actually selling stuff to the aliens.

Sarah was sure that it was only a matter of time before a big bank caught wind of this and simply put them out of business. The only advantage GC had was they started first. Stearns had said that the first mover was an edge, yes, but they'd be nuts if they were gonna just rest on their laurels and depend on it.

They needed Stearns, and from their meeting, he seemed genuinely interested in helping them grow the enterprise. He had seemed to be surprised to be offered that much stake in the company, but the women both agreed that all they had so far was a good idea, which was worth nothing without good execution.

If anyone could turn their novelty into a business, Dr. Stearns was their guy.

And if him giving notice to his employers that it was going to be his last quarter at the college a week later was any indication, it was generous enough.

The first thing Stearns did was institute a human merchant transaction fee as he had suggested.

Except in very rare circumstances, most payment networks used by humanity charged a fee. In the US, this was around 1-3%.

In countries where networks are growing, the percentage is lower to encourage growth.

In countries where networks have high transaction costs, the percentage is higher to reflect costs. Having to barter was the ultimate transaction cost.

At Galactic Credits, they charged 8%. This was an extraordinarily high fee, calculated using careful models, but the alternative was literally bartering, which all the human have agreed by now is just plain dumb.

So, they grumbled at the fee, but not a single human trader got off the network.

They used this newfound income and the allure of the stars to poach the branch manager and several of his employees at the BoA office next doors, and put them to work selling the idea of cards and currency to the aliens.

As time went on, they noticed that more and more human traders were beginning to specialize. It used to be they all bought and sold. Now, some were only buying, or only selling. As Stearns had predicted it would, behavior started to change.

The aliens saw that more humans were now coming to the spaceport with only a card and driving away with goods, or vice versa. It signified trust in the system. Some of them started signing up not intending to use it, but just to try to figure out what the humans were doing.

A few of the more daring ones even started asking about using credits to pay for their fuel at the spaceport facilities, which many of the human traders were happy to facilitate, for a fee.

Stearns put a stop to that pretty quickly when he learned about it. They just signed up the spaceport authorities for an account and cut out the middlemen.

Sarah and Jen also noticed that some human traders complained about the transaction fees to the alien traders in small talk.

For the alien businessbeings who saw trade as an adversarial relationship where the trader on the other side of the table was someone to be convinced or even defeated, the humans’ complaints actually increased trust in the Galactic Credits system.

After all, if Sarah was ripping the other guy off, maybe she’s not ripping me off so much.

Adoption among aliens reached half by the end of the week.

The second thing Stearns did was to start offering incentives for the aliens to sign up, or rather he made it uncomfortable for them not to.

Normally in a payment system, the merchant eats the cost of each transaction. When you swipe your card at a point of sale terminal, you don't pay the fee, the merchant does. She may charge you more money to use a card, which is not supposed to be allowed, or she may just quietly up some of her prices, but that's another story.

In the Galactic Credits system, because all the transactions took place in the hands of a human, the human had to pay the cost of doing business on both sides, both when they were buying and selling goods. This was the target of a lot of the complaints from human traders, especially the increasing number of exclusive buyers.

This was where the incentive came in.

Human traders that agreed to only buy items from aliens that took galactic credits had their buy fees waived.

This incentive was supposed to be enough to drive business towards the alien traders taking credits at the expense of the others, but not enough to force humans who exclusively sold items (fruit truckers like Benny) to become exclusive buyers to avoid fees. After all, the fee was 8% but this was a gold mine. Everyone was making exorbitant profits from the aliens.

Moreover, Stearns wanted the complaints to change. The human traders could still complain, but he wanted them to complain about something else.

He reasoned that businessbeings that were part of a standardized galactic trade network instinctively understood the value of institutions. An institution responsive to complaints is an institution good for business. This would logically drive up adoption.

Unexpectedly, this second reason did not even come into play. They would only much later learn why.

The incentives themselves, on the other hand, started to work…

Gorok belongs to a species that developed out of an ocean planet, called Ara. The R is silent.

Their civilization had started underwater, and after hundreds of thousands of years of development, the Arans managed to breach the surface of their ocean world and reach the stars using technology developed and refined in water.

To the casual human eye, they were humanoid robots, robotic feet and manipulators, with a head peeking out from an aquarium. Many traders called them "dolphinheads" behind their backs.

Because of how long it takes for an underwater species to develop anything, they often took a long view of things. The dolphinheads were an old species. They didn't mind taking things slow. Some might even call them patient.

In Sarah's view, they were just goddamn stubborn.

Gorok isn't a particularly obstinate member of her species, but the average of stubborn is still stubborn. It was annoying to have to deal with her, and a few of the human traders openly joked about punching her and her stupid fishbowl face if the security guards were not there.

Gorok does not trust these human Galactic Credits.

N'har is an unremarkable bipedal humanoid businessman. His planet, Yis'meh is known for incredibly beautiful and jarring landscapes, formed from active tectonic plate behavior and extreme weather patterns at high altitudes.

On the list of most interesting things on his planet, his species does not rank top 50.

Like most of the galaxy, he too had no concept of money, credit, or literally any economic system more complex than barter.

N'har does not trust these human Galactic Credits.

Scrulvi is from a species of six foot tall hedgehog-like quadrupeds called the Dlaivo.

They are born with incredibly hard shells, grow poisonous spikes on their back, and can gallop deceptively fast. Also, they breed very quickly. In the early days of their development, some combination of these factors was how they survived.

It was definitely not their brains. Most galactic species consider the Dlaivo to be the dumbest species to ever gain sentience and reach the stars. They survive in spite of their brains.

When they finally discovered FTL, predators on their home planet were actually still a major threat to their average resident because the Dlaivo had never found a solution to them. A neighboring species (the Bhaks) pitied them, decided to use their planet as a military training camp, and killed off all their natural predators for them over a couple of months of target practice exercises.

The Dlaivo thanked them profusely and never considered the possibility that they might be there to occupy and sell their people into slavery. Which, to their credit, the Bhaks did not do.

The Dlaivo were the butt of many village idiot jokes in the galactic community. For example, some would joke that the underwater Arans actually discovered how to make fire at an earlier point in their development than the Dlaivo.

Like other galactic beings, however, their prejudice against credits ran deep.

Scrulvi does not trust these human Galactic Credits.

Scrulvi trusted the humans, though. After all, Sarah and Jen had never cheated him. None of the human traders ever did. Sure, it seemed like they were giving the other traders better goods for their items, but the humans’ goods were very valuable, everyone could win, and Scrulvi almost always stumbled into one small profit or another anyway.

When Sarah offered to give him a credit account and to start trading with credits, he didn't understand, but Sarah is so nice! Surely, what she's offering can't be bad for him.

So Scrulvi stumbled into the greatest profit of his life when he was the only trader landed on the spaceport taking credits when Stearns’ incentives program got announced.

He offloaded all his sale items, filled his cargo hold with the highest quality fruit, all in record time, and with a fairly big chunk of change in his credits account.

He didn't know what to do with the credits, but maybe he can ask Sarah about that the next time he comes back to Earth… oh well.

N'har, the unremarkable, did not trust these credits, but he was seeing with his own six eyes what it's doing. For some reason, all the humans wanted to trade with the idiot Dlaivo next to him first.

Thinking about it, hah, they must be scamming him out of all his goods.

When Scrulvi took off half an hour later with a full hold, he was shocked. This must be some new scheme the humans are running with their new credits.

But when another Dlaiva (seriously, how did these morons even figure out how to operate spaceships?) took off ten minutes after she started taking credits, he was beginning to wonder.

Alright, maybe he was the mark, but he was burning to know what the trick was. The worst he has to lose is a little of his cargo, right? And whatever clever scam the humans thought up, maybe he could learn it and try it on someone else later.

He beckoned Sarah over, got a credits account, and took off half an hour later with a full hold of fruit and some leftovers in his credits account.

Must be a long con.

Gorok did not fill her hold that day. She watched angrily as the other traders around her all offloaded their goods and filled their cargo with fresh fruit.

One after another took off.

She refused to take credits from this Sarah human.

It was silly. It's just all numbers on a viewscreen.

She was a trader. She traded goods, for goods.

That's how it's done. That's how it's always been done. And that's how it'll always be done.

Eventually, the other traders in orbit complained that she was occupying the landing pad for far too long. She was forced to leave Earth without conducting a single sale or transaction.

After this trip, Gorok did not make many sales. Dwindling profits meant that she was forced to trade her ship in for a relatively small underwater plot near where she grew up. She built a beautiful home, had many little Arans, and lived happily ever after.

Not everyone was built for the offworld trading life.

They quit the fruit business. That was a side hustle that built up capital for them initially. What Galactic Credit had now was a bustling bank business that no longer needed that extra profit on the side to sustain their business model. And they didn’t want to remain in competition against their customers.

Benny Jr and Jen had done a little side project on a jailbroken Bohor air filter, and found that with a little tweaking, they could have the air filters intake the aerosolized oxides of carbon clogging up the atmosphere and forge them into beautiful pure diamonds.

They were selling that on the side for now, purely because of how profitable it was, but it was likely once everyone else figured that out, the artificial diamonds flooding the market would force a commodity crash, like gold had when alien gold flooded Earth's markets. There were rumors that the De Beers diamond monopoly company was buying up numerous Bohor air filters from the newly opened Johannesburg spaceport in South Africa.

Other than that, the fees were more than covering all their cost of doing business. The lawyers, the accountants, the servers, and a sizable salary for every founding employee.

Over the alien trader booths, more and more traders started putting up the signs that said, "I ❤️ GC”. Sarah was especially proud of those signs. They were given to traders who would take GC for all transactions to signal to humans that they were open for business.

By now, this was most of them.

Some new traders would occasionally come down and not have an account. They would quickly get an account and one of the GC signs, or rarely, they would refuse and be asked to leave by other traders waiting in line in orbit.

As it turns out, peer pressure was often just as powerful an economic force as a market incentive.

Getting the alien FTL comms tech from a bunch of technical drawings to interface with the Galactic Credits site was not easy, but Jen and her team of engineers had done it. They'd put together the first financial application on the GalacticNet, and to go with it, the first offworld point of sale system in the galaxy.

You can instantaneously access your credits account from one side of the galaxy to another. Several backup systems were also copied from existing human credit card systems, like offline transaction storage and carbon copy card sales slips.

After the traders' credits cards were upgraded to chip cards, Galactic Credits were rapidly becoming indistinguishable from any other payment systems on Earth.

As a result of the aliens' consumer economies being restricted in scale by barter, their GalacticNet was used much like the human Internet was in its early days: for academic, governmental, or military use.

Much of the traffic was for big picture information exchange. What passed through the FTL comms were big news headlines, research data, emergency calls for help…etc. Without widespread consumer goods in most societies, there were no personal computers, tablets, and phones.

It's not that aliens couldn't produce those goods; in fact, their electronics were in some ways much more advanced than human ones, but few people had them. They were produced in big batches, and then bartered off one by one to people with goods that electronics makers had.

The first consumer apps on the GalacticNet were made by humans because the first consumers on the GalacticNet were humans. And like the academics who watched normies flood the Internet in its early days, the existing users on the GalacticNet were filled with fascination, mixed with a noticeable trace of horror, as the residents of Earth began to flood the GalacticNet with porn, social media, games, businesses, and more porn.

At first, it was lonely. The GalacticNet wasn't much different from the Internet, plus a few brave aliens who would venture to upload videos introducing themselves to the masses of Earth.

Not to be left behind, some other civilizations started buying consumer electronics from Earth traders and handed them out to their people. And what started as a lonely project was starting to make the galaxy a closer, more connected place.

What the residents of Earth saw was definitely not what they expected.

As Sarah learned more about the way the galaxy worked, the more she felt bad for the aliens. From what she heard from the traders, saying that life sucked outside of Earth was an understatement.

There were always shortages. Not enough things were always being produced, so beings had to share things that shouldn't be shared. Most beings lived in absolute squalor.

The tiny percent of traders that she'd interacted with are supposedly some of the richest beings to have ever existed in the galaxy, and yet they still sometimes have trouble upgrading their ships, finding supplies or maintenance, or even just to buy a nest or house. They had few luxuries and quality of life goods.

"Without widespread usage of currency, economies are extremely limited. Bartering is so primitive by human standards, that there are some economic historians who say no barter economy has ever existed in human history because currency is so vital to any real economic activity that they have always gone together," Stearns had said.

Other economic experts on Earth have been predicting the same thing since the news of lack of money spread. She didn't believe it until she saw the footage on GalacticNet. Video of what the aliens considered to be normal life looked like ghettos, or even worse, disaster zones.

They had been able to make and acquire the ships and goods they had, through tens or hundreds of thousands of years of inheritance and hand-me-downs. They could create technological marvels beyond humanity's current means, but they could only do so with time. Lots and lots of time.

On a technological basis, they were collectively a bit further advanced than Earth. They could travel between the stars, cure cancer, and modify the atmosphere!

On a GDP or production per year basis, forget about industrialization. The galaxy hasn't even fully entered the feudal age.

This paradox shocked humans to their core.

For Sarah: At first Galactic Credits was a project to make money off aliens. At some point, it started being a project to make aliens smarter, to make them understand money, so it was easier to make money off them. And now, she could only see a path forward for it as a charity or some kind of galactic advancement project.

The galaxy needed help — now.

Galactic Credits was about to hold the galaxy's hands through a speed run of the last three millennia of human economic development.

A couple months after Stearns started making changes, the whole company drove down to the spaceport.

As Sarah and co reached the trader booths, they noticed a mix of human and alien traders chatting and joking around.

"Oh how about this one. What's the easiest way to become a millionaire?" Asked a human trader, with one of the oldest money jokes in the book. After a pause where the other human traders respectfully didn't ruin his joke, he delivered the punchline, "you start as a billionaire and let your son go shopping with your credit card harharhar."

The humans grinned and the aliens made their approximations of laughter.

"Hey it's Sarah and Jen! Speak of credits and cards, and here she comes!" Zarko said as he noticed them approaching.

"Hey-o Zarko, here's Dr. Stearns. Dr. Stearns, Zarko," Sarah introduced the two, and they nodded at each other in the traditional universal greeting that's become commonplace on the spaceport.

"Ah! Dr. Stearns," said Oliver, a human trader, grinning, "I hope you're not here to increase our fees again."

"You better believe your fees are increasing. I know what you put in that OJ you sell. That much sugar isn't good for the poor alien children, you know?" replied Stearns, who could take it and hit back about as good as any boomer could.

The other traders pretended to look at Oliver scandalously. Hah, as if they weren't all pumping their goods full of additive sugars to get the aliens hooked.

"Speaking of orange juice, I was trying to offload two tons of it for some reactor fuel on Zakabara Prime, and unfortunately the exchanges there did not accept fruit juice as an acceptable trade item for reactor fuel. Guess I won't be taking my business there again," huffed Zarko.

The other traders nodded knowingly. Zakabara Prime rarely accepted food products in exchange. The Zakabarans were an incredibly protectionist planet that had many farmers who didn't like the incredible competition that Earth was bringing to the table.

"Actually, that's one of the things we came here to talk about," Stearns put on his serious face, "we're about to start making offworld Galactic Credits consoles available to the trading public, within a year. It would allow you beings to buy and sell from other traders from anywhere in the galaxy!"

By this point, many of the alien traders that had normally bartered or traded with each other would come to Earth to use the terminals that the human merchants had to conduct fractional transactions, for a processing fee from the humans, of course. There was a small but growing number of human traders that would come with just their tablets and process cargo for aliens for free all day.

Technically, this was rent seeking of the worst kind, but GC had not discouraged this type of behavior. For one, Earth was growing to be an increasingly popular destination for traders galaxy-wide. This was excellent for business, and it was cementing Earth as the trade goods and exchange center of the galaxy. All trade routes led to Sol.

For another, technically these processing merchants were providing a service, one that was only necessary because there was no offworld usage of credits.

Now, GC was about to put them all out of business.

The implications of this were not lost on the aliens. They didn't understand money, but they are not stupid.

Well, except the Dlaivo.

Those oversized hedgehogs are very stupid.

What the traders knew is that whatever the humans were doing with these credits on Earth was very profitable for the traders, and they no longer thought of credits as a scam or scheme, but rather an intricate new institution that was rapidly expanding.

Traders everywhere were whispering about Earth's new system. The idea of a currency was becoming less of a taboo. The pamphlets freely handed out at its spaceports certainly didn't hurt.

Skeptics were still coming down the gravity well to see how it all worked, and not all of them were convinced. But many lifted off with a full cargo of fresh fruit and a credits account…

If you could use human credits offworld, no one was really sure what could happen.

Not even the humans.

"Sounds good, where do I sign up?"