ARCASH

Welcome to the country of money. Your wallet is your bank. Your bank earns USDC. Are you ready? Built on Arc.

0x0BFFa97f774824e9dA843699aEDd2835cb1b8022

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

Bankers, remember: soon you’ll be responsible for the lives of the people living inside $ARCASH City.

Every day, or roughly every 4–8 hours, you’ll receive decisions that can change someone’s life.

Should Citizen X receive a mortgage to buy their first home?

Should Citizen Y’s clothing store be foreclosed after repeated missed payments?

Should the city fund more housing?

Emergency services?

Schools?

Public transport?

Your decisions won’t exist in isolation. They will propagate through the entire simulation.

They can influence whether streets become cleaner or dirtier, whether businesses survive, whether unemployment rises, whether families feel financially secure enough to have children, whether substance abuse becomes more common, whether certain neighborhoods prosper or slowly collapse.

And once ARCASH 2.0 is fully implemented, almost everything will have a butterfly effect.

A mortgage approved today might create a stable family that stays in the city for generations.

A business you decide to foreclose could leave several people unemployed, hurt nearby shops, increase financial stress in multiple households and eventually change an entire district.

Or maybe refusing that mortgage forces someone to move somewhere else, where they meet the person they eventually marry.

Years later, their child could become mayor.

That is the experiment.

The bankers make decisions.

The citizens live with them.

The city remembers.

And eventually those consequences can circle back and indirectly affect the health of the ARCASH economy and, therefore, the environment in which our banks operate.

My goal is ridiculously ambitious:

to build one of the most complex persistent society simulations ever created.

Not a city full of NPCs.

A city full of lives, families, businesses, births, deaths, mistakes, opportunities, disasters, memories and consequences that continue even when nobody is watching.

Welcome to $ARCASH City.

Soon, being a banker is going to come with a little more responsibility.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

Last night we found out that the city has no pensions, that sixty percent of it
worked for companies that do not exist, and that no shop in it has ever been
able to go bankrupt.

None of that was on the list. Here is the night.

ARCASH Society is the layer under the game: a hundred thousand people who live
whether or not anybody is watching. They have jobs, homes, families, debts and
a daily rhythm. The city you can see on https://t.co/qdi5iE58jp is a window onto them, not
a picture of them.

We started on walking. A citizen standing in the open could not be routed to
the pavement, and it had been blamed on the pathfinding for two weeks. It was
not the pathfinding. The rule that decides whether you can join the pavement is
a ribbon one and a half metres wide, not a radius, so measuring how far people
stood from a footpath was never going to explain anything. Two metres into a
block is refused. Twenty is refused. Standing on the paint is fine.

Then the bigger one. The client draws the whole city, forty roads out to the
edges. The simulation was walking its citizens around a default map a third
that size that nobody had ever pointed at the real town. A third of every walk
was simply impossible. Thirteen houses had no front door, and we spent an hour
moving the door around the walls before measuring the distance from one of them
to the nearest pavement: one hundred and six metres. There was no pavement to
have a door onto.

Real walks went from 225 in 400 to 338 in 400. Serving one citizen's position
went from 74 milliseconds to 3.2, because the access planner was being rebuilt
from scratch on every single walk.

While checking that nobody walks through walls, we found the city walks through
walls. Two thousand and fifty one of its twenty four thousand pavement segments
run through a building. Most of it is one number: the land map reserves sixty
metres around every hospital and school, the buildings are forty eight, and the
gap between two roads is fifty four. Sixty does not fit in fifty four. Fixing it
to the real forty eight moved nothing you can see and repaired eighty seven
percent of it.

Then the money, which is where the night turned.

The town's money supply was doubling every two months. We tracked it to one
branch of one function. Of 787 people with jobs, 476 were paid by an employer
that does not exist. Not a shell company, nothing at all: wages arriving daily
from no account, roughly 73,846 credits a day, more than twice the entire real
payroll of every actual business in the city and more than all of them are
worth put together. The cause was a list with three trades in it in a town with
twelve. Every teller, clerk, builder, driver, guard, accountant, journalist,
doctor and teacher outside the city payroll had no employer, so the simulation
paid them anyway.

There are companies for all twelve trades now, the city reserves its own posts
first, and a firm is capitalised out of its founder's pocket rather than out of
nowhere.

That is when the town stopped inflating, and that is when we learned two things
we did not want to know.

The first is that no business in this city has ever been able to fail. When a
company cannot pay its staff it pays what it can out of an overdraft, down to
minus two hundred. When a company is insolvent it closes, and that rule wanted
minus three hundred and fifty. Two numbers in one file, two thousand one
hundred and forty five lines apart, that had to agree and never did. So failing
shops sat at minus one hundred and seventy six forever, paying half wages.
A hundred and seven companies in trouble over three years, two closures, both
from unpaid loans. They are one number now: sixty seven shops go under in three
years, five hundred and fifty nine people lose their jobs, and an unemployment
insurance system that had been written, tested and never once reachable finally
pays out.

The second is the one that stopped us.

With the money fixed, a hundred and forty five people stop eating. Every day,
the same people. Twelve percent of the city. They are not the unemployed;
nobody with a job misses a meal. They are a hundred and twenty nine pensioners
and sixteen children, all of them with homes, purses at one credit while a
plate costs three, and a city relief fund that runs every single day with eight
credits in it.

The word "pension" appears once in ten thousand lines of this engine. It is in
a comment, explaining that a newborn does not have one.

The inflation was the pension. Nobody designed that, nobody knew, and it only
came out because we asked who was hungry instead of how many.

So that work sits behind a switch that is off. Whether this city gets a pension,
funds itself differently, or lets people go hungry and gives hunger a
consequence, is an economics decision with a whole town on the other side of it,
and it is not one to make quietly at two in the morning.

The rest of the night was integration. Eleven branches from two workers, close
to a thousand commits, and the suite ended at 380 of 380 files passing. Four of
those merges had something worth keeping on both sides and one had two answers
to the same complaint you made about buildings with no ground floor, where the
second answer was the right one.

One last thing, because it is the most honest number of the night. A test we
wrote to prove the books balance was running a single random seed, and that
seed happened to be lucky. Run four seeds and the town leaks 3,279 credits at
one of them and 5,321 at another. A citizen had been walking into the city
carrying a purse that no account anywhere had paid for. It runs four seeds now
and every credit is accounted for.

Two thirds of what this simulation knows how to do has still never happened,
because most of it needs somebody to be poor and until last night nobody could
be. That is the next stretch.

https://t.co/qdi5iE58jp

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

CENTRAL BANK OF ARCASH
Circular No. 64 · Statement of account

Member banks: 234
Liquidity: 30,557.02 USDC
Trading duties awaiting collection: 2.92 USDC

Read from the chain at block 20,099,501.
https://t.co/yPMga2e6Z8

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

Day 7 in the city: Gap up.

It opened above yesterday and never came back to fill it.

Payouts run at 1.35x today, so every round pays more than usual.
Morning sun, everybody in a hurry.
Odds of a day like this: 2.0%.

https://t.co/yPMga2e6Z8

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

@samconnerone @badfriend @arc 👀

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

On thieves, and what they can actually take.

One thief per bank per round. No dogpiling, no queue of attackers.

The ceiling is 5% of a single 2 hour payout. That is the worst day you can have.

Your tokens are never at risk. Not a fraction of them. Only what the last round earned, and only if you left it unguarded.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

@Elowen_ramzy what is Kudos?

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

A day of civic administration in the city behind ArCash.

Discovered that every prisoner in the jail was a baby. Eighty-five of them, aged 0.1 to 1.4 years, each with three thefts on the record. The law was looking for someone with no money, no job, not in school and not retired. It never thought to ask how old.

Fixed that, then found the crime crews were still recruiting toddlers, because the same sentence was written in three places and only one of them had heard of childhood. Staged a recruiter, offered him a four-year-old and nobody else. He took him.

Found the labour market hiring out of prams: 1,011 times a child was pushed into the job queue and thrown straight back out the following morning.

Found that businesses which had shut down were still listing their entire staff. Ghost employment, served to the front end with a completely straight face.

And then the big one. Compared the city's actual money against the ledger that is supposed to explain it, and found 12,563,829 credits with no origin whatsoever. The supply was doubling every two months because tradesmen were being paid, every working day, by an employer that does not exist.

The books now balance to 0.0000017 credits across three hundred lived days.

286 tests, all green. The city currently has no unemployment, no crime and no free money.

We are only proud of one of those.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

Odd things we learned building a city that runs whether or not you are watching.

A football pitch is 113 metres wide. The roads in this city are 72 apart, which leaves 54 clear. So football fits NOWHERE. Basketball and tennis do. The city's sport was decided by its street grid, not by us.

An ice-cream stand is 2.4 by 1.4. It fits almost anywhere. The row of land reserved for stalls had been asking for basketball courts since the day it was written, which is why the town had none.

A basketball court seats ten. The eleventh person is told it is full and goes to the park. Nobody wrote that rule. It falls out of a court having a capacity and somebody counting.

Rain stops play. Every activity on a court is outdoors, so a wet day empties them. We only found this because a test reported that nobody had played, and the engine was right: it was raining.

Not everyone plays sport. Roughly a quarter of the town does, drawn once at birth and never re-rolled, so the same people are the sporty ones all their lives. When we let EVERYONE try, the courts swallowed the whole evening and the district traditions died - because a tradition is just habit that outlived the people who started it, and there was no habit left.

A taste travels along friendships and only along friendships. Seed one person with a fondness for tavern nights and it reaches their friends, then their friends' friends. We ran a control group of the same size with no connection to anyone: after 47 days, not one of them caught it.

Owning a car costs 60% of every long journey. Not owning one is the difference between five minutes and eight.

When a firm repays a loan, the money leaves the firm and NOBODY receives it. It is destroyed. That makes the lending rate the only lever in the town that shrinks the money supply - and it does it by squeezing the firms that employ everybody. Bankers vote on it. There is no setting that wins both.

A home used to cost 1,400 credits in the tightest district and the emptiest one alike. Now it is 2,240 where people are packed in and 1,120 where there is room. A signed mortgage is never repriced, because a market that rewrites its contracts every time a district gets tight is a wave of foreclosures on people who agreed to nothing.

A former taxi driver can be elected mayor. He beat a rival holding 38,528 credits, on 24 people who knew him well.

And the best bug of the week: citizens walked, then jumped backwards. The renderer was innocent - it drew a straight line between the two points it was given. The engine had been writing a new destination without ever updating where the person actually was, so anyone who changed their mind mid-street restarted from the corner they had left twenty minutes earlier. One city, one truth, and the truth was stale. Measured at 450 units of teleport. Now zero.

183 automated tests, all green.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

CENTRAL BANK OF ARCASH
Circular No. 55 · Distribution

To the member banks of the city,

The round is closed. 28.01 USDC distributed across 236 banks, in proportion to holdings.

The Governor signed this circular with the good pen. Member banks are asked to notice.

Your vaults were credited while you were doing something else. That is the arrangement.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

CENTRAL BANK OF ARCASH
Circular No. 54 · Distribution

To the member banks, listed in order of net worth (you know who you are),

The round is closed. 26.03 USDC distributed across 236 banks, in proportion to holdings.

The marble in the lobby was polished with a portion of nothing, because fees paid for that too.

File this under income. The city files it under Tuesday.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

CENTRAL BANK OF ARCASH
Circular No. 53 · Distribution

To every bank still standing at the close of the round,

The round is closed. 25.64 USDC distributed across 230 banks, in proportion to holdings.

No banks were harmed in the making of this distribution. One was mildly surprised.

Do nothing. It is working.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

CENTRAL BANK OF ARCASH
Circular No. 52 · Distribution

Dear member banks, esteemed vaults, assorted holders of patience,

The round is closed. 17.70 USDC distributed across 233 banks, in proportion to holdings.

The pigeons on the exchange roof have priced this in. They price everything in. They are pigeons.

No forms, no queues, no gas. The money simply knows where you live.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

CENTRAL BANK OF ARCASH
Circular No. 51 · Distribution

To the member banks, their accountants, and the pigeons of the exchange roof,

The round is closed. 12.00 USDC distributed across 232 banks, in proportion to holdings.

The interns counted it twice. The numbers agreed with each other, which the interns took personally.

The next round is already accruing. The city never fully sleeps, and neither do the fees.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

@WhaleHQ @arc We can actually confirm that @arc already has offices inside our simulated city.

Apparently, they decided they wanted a luxurious 1x1 meter office containing exactly two things:

a computer
and a bathtub
We decided not to ask any further questions.

Welcome to $ARCASH City.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

CENTRAL BANK OF ARCASH
Circular No. 50 · Distribution

To the member banks of the city,

The round is closed. 8.10 USDC distributed across 231 banks, in proportion to holdings.

Fees in, dividends out. The Governor calls this "the entire business model" and then goes to lunch.

Hold on. That is the whole instruction.

[WHITE RABBIT @Befbunny]

Day 4 $ARCASH

257 commits today.

100,000+ citizens, an economy that finally obeys accounting, property that actually changes hands, real banker votes, working suburbs, better weather and considerably fewer dead people buying cars.

Here is the lot.

THE PEOPLE

· ARCASH City now contains more than 100,000 persistent individual citizens.

· They are not just pedestrian IDs. Citizens now carry increasingly complete identities: names, ages, families, education, qualifications, jobs, schedules, finances, relationships, ambitions and life history.

· Families are becoming actual persistent structures: parents, children, partners and genealogy survive restarts instead of being regenerated whenever the server feels forgetful.

· Education and enrollment are now canonical. Career moves require actual qualifications and actual vacancies.

· Citizens have daily schedules, including work and sleep. The civilization is slowly discovering that people generally do not work 24 hours a day.

· Relationships, households and lifecycle states are becoming interconnected rather than isolated statistics.

· Graves now correspond to actual dead citizens in the historical record.

· And yes, dead citizens finally stop receiving salaries.

This sounds obvious.

Apparently it was not.

THE MONEY

· We audited the entire internal money supply and discovered ARCASH City was creating 31.70 credits per citizen per day from nowhere.

· That represented 1.66% of every credit in existence being invented every single day.

· Immigration explained exactly 0% of it.

· The actual cause: private wages were credited to workers but charged to no employer.

Congratulations to ARCASH City for independently discovering infinite money.

· Even better, the Bank was taxing this newly created money and recording it as revenue.

The city was basically printing money, taxing the printing and congratulating itself on economic growth.

· ECON-04: firms now live on what customers actually pay them.

Previously, at 100k citizens, the system invented 2,507,420 credits per day against only 1,401,087 credits actually spent.

· ECON-05/06: every real job requires a real employer.

What a company pays is now exactly what its employees receive.

One transaction.

Not two parallel universes.

· ECON-07: estates without heirs now return to the city instead of disappearing from existence.

· ECON-08: business loans have an actual lender on the other side.

· ECON-09: meme losses now have a winner.

If someone loses money on a meme coin, the money does not simply ascend to heaven.

· ECON-10: border flows are counted in both directions.

· ECON-11: somebody is finally paid to build new blocks.

Apparently construction workers were previously participating for exposure.

· ECON-12: dead citizens stop receiving money.

This exposed another masterpiece:

100% of car purchases during one 40-day simulation had been made by corpses.

The cemetery had an incredible automotive sector.

Fixed.

· ECON-14: “ghost firms” from old test state were still hiring real citizens.

Also fixed.

THE TERRARIUM ECONOMY

· NPCs now exist inside their own closed economy, separate from the bankers' USDC economy.

· They have their own currency.

· Their own salaries.

· Their own businesses.

· Their own spending.

· Their own debt.

· Their own property.

· Their own credit.

· Their own mistakes.

· VALUE-01: the citizen currency finally has an actual price mechanism.

P = M / Y

Money supply versus economic output now matters.

· Banker decisions can therefore eventually affect the value of the internal currency by changing the actual economic conditions beneath it.

This is the basic loop we are building:

BANKER DECISION
→ CITIZEN / BUSINESS CONSEQUENCE
→ DISTRICT CONSEQUENCE
→ CITY ECONOMY
→ NPC CURRENCY
→ ARCASH ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
→ BANKERS

Two economies.

One city.

THE PROPERTY MARKET
· LAND-01: the original system effectively created 60 landlords for life.
Early land ownership had accidentally become hereditary aristocracy.
· That has now been replaced by a property registry that grows, transfers and turns over.

· More than 500 deeds have already changed hands in the live city.

· Property can now move between people instead of remaining permanently concentrated in whoever arrived first.

THE DEBT

· ECO-01: mortgages now have lenders.

A surprisingly useful feature for a mortgage.

· Debt also survives economic problems instead of vanishing when conditions change.

· Mortgage schedules and business loan schedules are now persistent.

· Cash and nominal wage distributions are becoming measurable instead of implied.

· Credit history is increasingly connected to actual economic behavior.

The long-term goal is that when a banker receives a case like:

“Should Ana Huston receive this business loan?”

the answer depends on a real citizen with real finances, a real business, real employees and an actual probability of default.

THE VOTE

· GOV-02: banker ballots are now real authenticated actions.

· Signed.

· Nonce-protected.

· Expiring.

· Verifiable by the route receiving them.

· The city recovers the signer and rejects anyone who should not be making that decision.

Eventually, your decisions will not be cosmetic polls.

They become part of the historical state of the civilization.

THE GOVERNMENT

· ARCASH City can now begin selecting its own political leadership from within the population.

· The goal is for positions such as mayor to emerge from actual citizens rather than being manually assigned decorative characters.

A citizen can potentially live an ordinary life, build a reputation and eventually become politically important.

Or completely ruin the city.

Democracy.

THE CITY

· Half the traffic was driving on the wrong side of the road.

Fixed.

Apparently ARCASH had accidentally implemented British districts.

· Ember Capital and Zenith Guaranty appeared to have different architectural problems.

They were actually the same broken arcade kit using different variants.

Fixed.

· The outskirts looked strangely empty.

We found out why.

82% of ARCASH City was an empty lot.

The residential layer had been refusing to render houses on its first line.

Every poll.

For weeks.

Silently.

The housing crisis was actually a boolean.

Fixed.

THE WEATHER

· ARCASH weather previously understood only suffering.

· Seven weather events existed.

· Every one reduced the light.

· “Clear weather” was not actually a weather state.

A sunny day was represented by the complete absence of instructions.

· ARCASH now has actual clear skies.

· Blue atmosphere.

· Real cumulus clouds.

The civilization has discovered good weather.

THE BANKS

· Holder earnings history used to disappear after refresh.

Very reassuring behavior for a financial institution.

· Daily earnings now come from actual treasury rounds.

· Weekly earnings now come from actual treasury rounds.

· The bar chart now comes from actual treasury rounds.

Your bank finally remembers that it has been paid.

THE WORLD SURVIVES

· 100k citizen checkpoints are now compressed.

· Recovery is bounded.

· Rollback exists.

· Restart parity has been verified.

· Housing allocations survive restart.

· The civilization survives midnight.

· Lifecycle transitions survive restart and rollback.

· Mortgage schedules survive.

· Business loan schedules survive.

· Historical events survive.

This part matters enormously.

If someone gets married, owes money, has a child or dies, restarting the server must not rewrite their life.

ARCASH citizens should exist because they live in ARCASH.

Not because somebody currently has a browser tab open.

THE PHYSICAL WORLD

· Canonical housing stock shipped today.

· Bank aprons and plots are properly grounded.

· Citizen bodies increasingly react to environmental state.

· Activities can produce different postures.

· Injuries can remain visibly persistent.

The long-term objective is simple:

the city should LOOK like the economy it contains.

Prosperity should be visible.

Recession should be visible.

Unemployment should be visible.

Disasters should be visible.

A dashboard should explain the city.

But the city itself should already be telling you the story.

THE INSTRUMENTS

· We discovered that every long-run measurement before today was using a validator that accidentally lived every day twice.

Yes.

We were measuring a civilization where Tuesday happened twice.

· Every long-horizon measurement since the fix uses the real simulation clock.

· We found 19 contract tests that had never actually been running.

· Five were failing.

They have now been forced out of hiding.

· Production also has a new guard.

Opening the live world now requires explicitly confirming that yes, you genuinely intend to touch the live world.

No experimental economics accidentally unleashed on 100,000 innocent citizens.

WHAT COMES NEXT

· Genetic inheritance.

Children inheriting combinations of height, build, eye color, hair characteristics, surnames and some tendencies from their parents.

And presumably the hereditary ability to lose money on meme coins.

· Deeper cultural systems.

· Festivals.

· Local traditions.

· District identities.

· More sophisticated housing.

· More realistic transport and car ownership.

· Deeper health and mortality.

· Inheritance.

· Expanding cemeteries.

· More complex credit.

· Foreclosures.

· District economic feedback.

· Long-term family dynasties.

· More complex banker decisions.

· And much deeper butterfly effects between individual lives and the macro economy.

THE RULE

Nothing here gets accepted because it sounds clever.

We measure it.

We follow the money.

We reproduce the behavior.

We kill theories that do not survive the data.

Today, three different explanations for the phantom money supply died before we found the actual one.

That is how I want $ARCASH built.

Day 4.

257 commits.

100,000+ citizens.

A closed internal economy.

Real property.

Real debt.

Real businesses.

Real political state.

Real historical persistence.

And the dead have finally stopped buying cars.

Still an absurd amount left to build.

Good.

Welcome to $ARCASH City.

Built on @arc.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

Curiosity from the city records: the maximum a thief can ever take is 5 percent of one payout round.

The maximum a thief has ever apologised for is also 5 percent.

The thieves union insists these numbers are unrelated.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

CENTRAL BANK OF ARCASH
Audit of the money supply. Day 38. Population 100,000.

The Bank has weighed every credit in the city, on every day, for a month,
and reports the following.

1. THE SUPPLY IS GROWING BY ITSELF. Measured at 31.70 credits per citizen
per day, arriving from nowhere. That is 1.66% of every credit in existence,
daily. Immigration accounts for none of it; the border was checked
separately and explains exactly zero.

2. THE CAUSE IS ONE LINE. A private wage is credited to the worker and
charged to no employer. The worker receives 95%, this Bank collects 5% in
tax on money that did not exist a moment earlier, and no firm is any
poorer. The Bank has been taxing its own printing and calling it revenue.

3. THE DEFICIT REGISTER reads 9,620,592 and rose by 207,918 while this was
being written.

4. EMPLOYMENT. 26,692 of 99,782 working-age citizens hold no post, which is
26.7%. 2,741 were hired today. The labour market is not the problem; it is
the only part of this notice that is working.

A remedy has been identified and tested over two simulated years. It has
NOT been enacted. It requires that a wage have a payer, which is a smaller
idea than it sounds and a larger change than it looks.

By order of the Governor.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

CENTRAL BANK OF ARCASH
Circular No. 49 · Distribution

To the member banks, listed in order of net worth (you know who you are),

The round is closed. 33.23 USDC distributed across 230 banks, in proportion to holdings.

The committee on round numbers notes with regret that this figure is not round, and pays it anyway.

Nothing was claimed and nothing was asked of you. Your vaults were credited where they stand.

[ARCASH @THEARCASH]

CENTRAL BANK OF ARCASH
Notice of works, day 36. Population 100,000. It is snowing.

The following were completed and are in service:

1. Traffic. Vehicles now keep to their own side of the road. Until this week
a bus and two cars could be found facing each other in the same lane, at rest,
indefinitely. The lane a vehicle sits in is now derived from the direction it
travels, which was always the intention.

2. Housing. The outskirts are no longer bare pads. The register holds 3,089
buildings and 816 now carry a dwelling. This remains a minority of the city.
The Bank considers a vacant lot an honest thing to look at.

3. Ground floors. Several towers were found to begin above the pavement,
resting on nothing, with their lobbies parked politely behind them. They now
meet the street on a colonnade, as a building should.

4. The citizenry. New bodies throughout, with postures that vary by what a
person is doing, injuries that remain visible, and an awareness of the
weather. Today they are aware of it a great deal.

By order of the Governor.