隨筆

- Credit - People talk too much about debt and not enough about credit. Credit comes in two forms. The older way to store credit was with things — goods that people generally want and can directly use. Stockpile food, metals, livestock, or tools, and others will work for you in exchange for those goods. This was the foundation of wealth for most of human history; even though systems of debt existed, wealth itself was embodied in things. That began to change gradually with financialization, but the real break came when money became purely fiat. Once money no longer represented any specific physical reserve, the line between credit and debt effectively disappeared. Credit wasn’t stored in goods anymore — it became stored in promises. In earlier times, holding value meant owning something real. Today, holding value means the system owes you something real. What most people now call “wealth” is in fact a collection of claims — bank deposits, stocks, bonds — all forms of debt owed by others. Only a few hold wealth directly in physical form, and even then, it’s usually mediated through a custodian or institution; a vault full of gold, after all, is still a promise that the vault owes you gold. The new form of credit turns wealth into a kind of dependence. To be “rich” now is not to possess abundance, but to stand higher in a hierarchy of obligations — to have a larger claim on what the system must deliver. It is a subtle inversion: wealth as ownership becomes wealth as leverage, plenty becomes promise, and security becomes another person’s debt. If this web of promises were ever fully unwound, we might find that our wealth was mostly vapor — numbers that vanish once the chain of obligations ends. Humanity would not be poor in things, but poor in claims; insolvent not in substance, but in agreement. Our prosperity relies on never asking to settle in full, on keeping the circle of credit unbroken so the idea of wealth can keep moving. [Vibe-written in collaboration with GPT5]