Not at all. I grew up in a Europe that was part socialist, part capitalist. Hell, when I first visited Berlin in 1984 they had two economies in the same city. Of course, they did not have a frictionless Single Market encompassing both, but at the time neither did anyone else. When I first traveled to the UK, in 1977, I needed a passport, and there were restriction on the amount of money you could take with you, either in cash or in traveller’s cheques. So, it’s OK to imagine some restrictions to trade. In the Assembly I used the trick of the non-convertible currency. Trade is permitted, although not frictionless; but sellers do not want your currency, because the issuing state refuses to redeem it for other currencies. That’s how the Democratic German Republic and East Berlin operated, too.
Think of it this way: if you are Gaetano in Messina, you need to build your utopia in such a way that it does not die on contact with the non-utopia. Imagining open economies is, the way I see it, a way we can build “a credible path from here to there”.
I am not dismissing the ledger idea, I am just saying I have no ready solution. Others might. Anyway, it is interesting to think about it.
Why would energy be more scarce here? We have photovoltaic now, and sunlight will be the same across Witness.
Once again, to be credible this has to be an outcome of the system, not a parameter. Why would people here reject connectivity, that is obvious to us and others in Witness? Exceptions: credible historical or geographical parameters. So, for things that need expensive land connectivity (eg. aqueducts), it makes sense that the Avantgrid, being an archipelago, would develop its own solution. In the Assembly, I imagined that the supply shock on energy and food invented by Yudha left the Distrikt with highly decentralized production and the capacity to regulate it: