The challenge
The financial system we take for granted wasn't designed. It was improvised — by merchants, ship captains, and colonial administrators trying to solve problems that hadn't existed before.
Distance. Time. Risk that couldn't be measured. Counterparties who might never return. They invented tools to handle all of it. We still use most of them.
Those tools weren't neutral. They were built to serve specific interests, extract value from specific places, and concentrate return in specific hands. The communities at the other end of those voyages rarely benefited from the instruments designed around them.
Space recreates every one of those conditions. The design choices — who bears risk, who captures return, what counts as value — are as open now as they were then. This time they can be made deliberately.
The original problem
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European trade reached distances that broke every existing financial convention. Voyages took years. Cargo might be worth a fortune or lost entirely. No legal system had authority beyond the horizon.
New instruments were invented to handle it. Most are still with us. What is less often said is that many were also instruments of extraction — designed to move value from frontier conditions back to the metropole, and to distribute risk onto the people least able to refuse it.
The structural problems they solved were real. The values embedded in their design were choices.
Six instruments, six problems
Joint-stock companies — The VOC, 1602.
Capital required for a voyage to Java exceeded what any individual could risk. Pooled investment, transferable shares, distributed risk. Also a sovereign instrument of colonisation — granted the right to wage war, imprison people, and establish colonies. The share certificate distributed risk among investors in Amsterdam. It did not distribute returns to the communities being extracted from.
In space: Generation-scale infrastructure needs capital that exceeds any single balance sheet. The design question is who holds shares, who has governance rights, and whether the people living and working in these environments have any claim on what they produce.
Marine insurance — Lloyd's Coffee House, late seventeenth century.
Ships sank, were seized, or never returned. Underwriting syndicates pooled risk widely enough that no single loss broke the system. The same instrument made the slave trade insurable and therefore scalable. Enslaved people were listed as cargo. Their death at sea was a covered loss.
In space: Parametric triggers — automatic payouts when a defined event occurs, no investigation required — are already being tested for satellite operations. Who can access the market, and what gets covered, are design choices that repeat the same questions.
Letters of credit — Medieval Italy.
Paying a supplier in another city without moving gold. A correspondent bank at the destination pays on presentation of the document. Institutional trust substitutes for physical presence. Worked well for those inside the banking network. Irrelevant to those outside it.
In space: When confirmation takes 24 minutes each way, any transaction that depends on real-time verification breaks. The letter of credit model — a third party guarantees performance once defined conditions are met — is the template. Who operates the network, and on whose terms, is as live a question as it was in medieval trade.
Futures markets — Amsterdam Bourse, 1602.
Agreements to buy or sell at a fixed price on a future date. Turned time into a tradeable dimension. Gave producers certainty; gave speculators leverage.
In space: Ore contracts settled four years after extraction. Water ice priced against a comet's orbital return. The mechanism extends to much longer horizons — but the contract has to handle the possibility that the asset never arrives, and that the people who bear that risk may not be the ones who priced it.
Currency exchange — Medieval and early modern trade.
As trade crossed dozens of jurisdictions with incompatible currencies, money changers emerged to convert between them. The exchange rate was invented because value needed to move across jurisdictions that didn't trust each other's money.
In space: There is no central bank with authority over the rate between Earth and Mars. A Martian unit of account backed by local convention and productive capacity is not a distant hypothetical — it is an inevitable design problem for any settlement operating beyond Earth's financial infrastructure.
Central banking — Bank of England, 1694.
A loan to the Crown in exchange for the right to issue banknotes. The note worked because people believed it would be honoured — backed first by royal authority, eventually by law. Money is a shared agreement backed by an institution with enforcement power.
In space: What backs a unit of value on a generation ship with no connection to Earth? The history of money suggests the anchor can be a commodity, an institution, or a sufficiently widespread social agreement. Designing that anchor deliberately is one of the genuinely open problems in space economy design.
What the rest of the world was doing
The European instruments that came to dominate global commerce were not the only responses to the same problems.
Hawala
Developed across the Islamic world from at least the eighth century. Value moves across distance without money moving. A sender gives funds to a broker; a correspondent broker at the destination pays the recipient. Settlement happens periodically, in bulk. The system runs entirely on reputation. No institutional backing required. It predates the letter of credit, operates where formal banking doesn't reach, and has survived for over a thousand years. For space contexts without institutional infrastructure, it may be the more relevant model.
The waqf
Capital dedicated to a public purpose in perpetuity. Principal preserved; only income distributed. Some waqf institutions have operated continuously for over a millennium. For assets that need to outlast their founders, or missions measured in generations, nothing in Western finance comes close as a precedent.
Rotating savings clubs
Arisan, susu, hui, tanda, chit funds. Found independently across dozens of cultures with no common origin. Members contribute to a pool; each takes a turn receiving it. No interest, no institution, no collateral. The oldest and most widespread form of credit in human history. For communities operating beyond formal banking — which describes most plausible space settlements for much of their early history — this is not an exotic alternative. It is the baseline.
These systems didn't displace European instruments in global trade — not because they were inferior, but because European states had the power to set the terms. The financial system we inherited is the result of both design and power. That matters for what comes next.
The parallel moment
We are at the beginning of a period when every one of those conditions is being recreated. Communication delays that make verification impossible. Time horizons that extend beyond lifetimes. Risks that have never been priced. Jurisdictions that don't yet exist.
The instruments that will handle these conditions don't exist yet. Most will be invented under pressure, understood as general-purpose tools only after they've spread. The teams in the room when those decisions get made will shape what the space economy looks like for generations.
Whether it recreates the extractive patterns of the first age of exploration — or builds something with different values in its architecture — depends on whether the people designing the instruments have thought carefully about what they're doing.
What Money for Mars makes possible
Money for Mars is a workshop that puts teams inside that design problem. It doesn't prescribe what the answers should look like.
Some teams adapt existing instruments: parametric insurance for unverifiable risk, trust-based credit for communities without banking infrastructure, futures contracts extended across decades.
Others go further. Teams have designed systems that trade reputation rather than currency. Instruments that distribute decision rights rather than monetary return. Structures built around collective stewardship rather than ownership. Economies where extraction is architecturally constrained rather than merely discouraged.
The space context makes these questions unavoidable. When there is no central bank, no court, no enforcement mechanism, and no shared history, what value is, who bears risk, and who captures return has to be answered from first principles.
That is what the exercise is for.
→ Continue to the workshop description