Cubit (𝔛)

𝔛1, 𝔛5, 𝔛10, 𝔛20, 𝔛50, 𝔛100, 𝔛500, 𝔛1000, 𝔛2000, 𝔛5000, 𝔛10,000

**Used**

The **cubit** (𝔛) is an ancient cryptocurrency created by the Aoshanti Empire commonly used in international exchanges. It is minted and stored on very specific hardware and carried around on small flash drives. Transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in publicly accessible ledgers called blockchains.

There is, it is estimated, around eight hundred sextillion cubits in circulation throughout the Aegis Cluster, a number which results in individual cubits being nearly worthless: it takes several million cubits to complete an ordinary transaction, and transactions on astronomical scales tend to range into the quadrillions, quintillions, and sextillions.

This has led most nations use and mint their own currency for domestic economic exchanges. However, the cubit has stuck around as a reliable medium of exchange between countries, financial institutions, and multinational corporations due to its ubiquity, security, and the presence of existing infrastructures which supports it.

## History

The Cubit was introduced as a digital currency for the entire cluster by the Mid-Aoshanti Empire in a reform which was meant to clamp down on counterfeiting and the tendency of imperial governments to use their arbitrary powers over money to mint money for their own projects and to wage wars. The cubit was initially introduced for its security and difficulty of production, requiring even the supercomputers and superintelligences of the time enormous amounts of computing power to produce.

For tens of thousands of years afterwards, the Cubit and its decentralized system of mints stabilized the cluster economy and provided security in economic exchanges, and the money supply slowly grew with the economy. However, in the Late Empire, an economic crisis occurred which demonstrated the limits of the imperial government to respond to economic crises when lacking the ability to print their own currency. The Emperor built a megastructural computer for the sole purpose of minting cubits. This engine got the Empire through the crisis, although it was only ever used sparingly and at 1% of its total output. Over time, norms around the printing of money decayed again, and emperors began to use the mechanism more and more frequently and for less and less essential tasks, leading to a gradual devaluation of the Cubit.

During the crises which led to the Fall of the Empire, the megastructure was used extensively as the Late Empire attempted to wage war on multiple fronts, leading to hyperinflation and the accelerated collapse of the empire. The megastructure fell into the hands of a successor state, which also used it extensively for many years afterwards to its own advantage, until finally the megastructure was destroyed by an international coalition attempting to stabilize the cluster economy.

This is the reason the modern cubit is worth so little. The minting of cubits is still decentralized and all countries mint cubits to varying degrees; however, minting on megastructural scales as the Late Empire did is forbidden by international laws and norms, and any country which has undertaken such projects has tended to find themselves on the wrong end of an international coalition.