This is part 2 in a longer series on the economics on mars. I haven't written part 1 yet, but i'll publish it as soon as i do.

Lemmy might be the worst place to discuss this subject because lots of people here identify as politically left so anything that touches private company ownership and banks might be a bit of a sensitive issue here. But i'll write it anyways because my target audience is not lemmy as a whole, but whoever thinks the same way i do.

Mars will not be communist, nor will it be socialist (no "luxury gay space communism"). It will be ultra-capitalistic, probably more so than the US already is today. Why? Because i believe that expanding a settlement requires lots of hard work to be put into it; And if the experiences on earth are anything to go by, people avoid doing hard work except if it's 1. their hobby or 2. they get a reward for it. Experience has shown that 1. is a feasible way of doing things as long as you don't expect maximum performance to be done. Like, schools are still being operated even without a profit incentive because some people like teaching but you'd have to accept that the teachers will be less willing to put up with daily bullshit if they don't get paid. Also houses would be less big, streets would be less wide, cars would be less fast if people didn't get paid enough to actually crunch the numbers and do the hard work.

Mars is going to be a high-growth environment. This means that putting in hard work will be preferable to doing everything as a hobby, which is why the concept of being paid according to your work output will still be upheld, which is the core concept of ableism, at-will employment, and private ownership.

This time i want to discuss the role of banks and how they might form. Banks, in essence, provide an abstraction layer by replacing natural resources (like water) with abstract resources, in other words: money. So a bank might offer to store water for you in a big tank and hand it out to you later, in exchange for a fee. The transaction mechanism might involve giving out certificates that you gave your water to them, in other words: money. You give 1 kg of water to the bank, the bank gives 1 $ (issued by the bank) to you, and later you can give 1 $ back to the bank and they give you back almost 1 kg of water (minus a "transaction fee"). The advantage of such a transaction to the end user might be that storing large amounts of water is both 1. important, because you might need the water later and 2. expensive, if you want to store lots of it, since it requires space and might get stolen.

Water is an especially interesting product since it has lots of uses (you can generate oxygen through electrolysis and use it in green-houses for agriculture) and at the same time is kinda expensive, because it has to be extracted out of the ground, which is an expensive operation to do. So it has both high cost to produce and high usefulness which creates high demand, which are both rather stable, which makes it an ideal exchange commodity with almost stable value over time. Abstract money might reflect that commodity by mapping a certain amount of currency to a certain amount of water.