For me it mostly came from this:
To me it sounds like each trade is a duel. You stand on neutral ground, bring no more than 2 second’s each, force a certain kind of bargaining, and everyone’s proud of this. If I need to buy a box of food from the next Canton all the people involved need to travel somewhere else, treat it like a duel, we all love that, but we hate waste? This is so wasteful, so inefficient! Why would this happen?
This could happen if all Cantons feel threatened by the others. If I think everyone’s always planning to take my stuff, I’ll be very wary whenever anyone visits and treat all trade in a manner which maximizes my security - neutral ground, seconds, pride and defensiveness.
The ledger and money reducing in value with use are strange ideas to me and seem very compute-expensive, but they could fit in with an almost religious or actually religious (See your “Dune” reference) eco-conservation culture. If you’re energy-poor and see up close the damage that harm to the world can do, than keeping close control and track of the energy you use could both make sense and be pro-survival, so there’s a reinforcement mechanism. This still leaves the problem of the deadweight loss - you need to spend energy and resources to store this information and use it. What level of energy use is worth logging depends on the marginal cost of compute, with levels just under that being possibly culturally-religiously monitored, and with philosophies about wasting small amounts of energy is bad thing and builds up to massive costs that we can’t track and harms us all and being…‘sins’?
Some people this works on. Some semi-believe but do because of social sanction in small Cantons.
Makes me think of something like an Avantgrid youth version of the Amish rumspringa or simply teen rebellion - you go to Libria or Hygga and waste some energy! You revel in being inefficient and wasteful and rebellious and fun! But then most of you feel bad, realize you’re harming the world and your friends and family and human race, and go home to Avantgrid to live a low-energy lifestyle, be proud of your self-reliance, and know that by doing so you’re helping save the world. You can even measure it in (CO2 levels? Sea acidity? Species return? All of the above and more.), You can literally see how you’re helping improve the world, both outside your window and in your ledger.