SCENE:
Same Brisbane pub.
Same sticky table.
Bill (Old Miner):
Heard you lot talkin’ last week.
Bloody entropy this, coherence that.
Figured I’d come back and see if the world ended yet.
Anna (physicist):
Not yet, Bill.
Entropy’s patient.
Riley (FIFO):
What’s entropy?
Is that when your roster goes to shit and no one knows what day it is?
Jesse (biologist):
Honestly? Close enough.
Adam (economist, already defensive):
We’re just discussing currency sustainability.
How stable coins aren’t actually stable.
Bill:
Course they’re not stable.
Nothin’ stable about something backed by bugger all.
Adam:
They’re supposed to maintain a peg.
Bill:
Yeah, and I’m supposed to maintain a marriage.
Doesn’t mean it happened.
Riley:
Stable coin.
That’s like calling a cyclone “mildly breezy.”
Anna:
Right, let’s explain this properly.
A “stable coin” is meant to track the value of something real — say, a dollar.
Riley:
Does it?
Anna:
About as well as you track your sleep cycle.
Bill:
See son, the problem is the coin ain’t got a mine behind it.
Nothing physical.
No dirt shoveled.
No ore out of the ground.
Just promises stacked on promises.
Adam:
Technically it’s about maintaining parity through—
Anna (cuts him off):
Through confidence.
A polite word for hoping no one notices the peg’s made of wet cardboard.
Mira (software engineer):
Stable coins pretend they’re outside entropy.
As if they’re pegged to some eternal reference frame.
Riley:
Translation?
Mira:
They think they can hold value without doing any work.
Bill:
Ah. Bloody crypto FIFO mates tried that.
Bought some “stable coin” and it destabilised so fast their hairline receded.
Anna:
Here’s the physics version:
Everything in the universe is updating all the time — field configurations shifting.
We call that “time.”
Nothing stays fixed unless you pay the energy bill to keep it coherent.
Jesse:
But stable coins pretend value can stay put without coherence being maintained.
No energy in, no resource backing, no constraints.
Just a magical fixed number on a screen.
Bill:
Sounds like the safety stats at my old site.
“Zero incidents.”
Yeah right.
Adam:
Look, stable coins work if they’re backed by enough reserves.
Anna:
No, mate.
They work if — and only if — the rate of real-world coherent state changes behind them matches the pegged value.
Riley:
Which means…?
Anna:
If one coin says it equals one dollar,
then somewhere, somehow,
there needs to be an actual dollar’s worth of physical capacity
— energy, materials, labour —
to make that claim real.
Bill:
Otherwise it’s just a fancy IOU stapled to thin air.
Mira:
Stable coins fail for the same reason your economy overshoots:
they assume coherence doesn’t spread.
But it always does.
Entropy always enlarges the configuration space.
Riley:
Say it normal.
Mira:
Gaps get exposed.
Promises unwind.
The peg snaps.
Jesse:
Exactly.
Observation spreads coherence — the moment people look closely, the illusion collapses.
Bill:
Same with FIFO rosters.
Boss says it’s stable.
You actually look at it — it ain’t.
Adam (sighing):
Alright then.
So what would make a stable coin stable?
Anna:
Tie it to a physical process with a real limit.
Energy production, mineral throughput, food output.
Anything that has a measurable rate of state change in the real world.
Bill:
Tie it to iron ore.
At least you know where the value’s buried.
Riley:
Tie it to lithium.
Then it’ll spike whenever Elon tweets.
Jesse:
Tie it to sunlight.
Then you’ve got a global, renewable clock of coherence.
Mira:
Tie it to entropy.
Then you’ve invented the first honest currency.
Adam:
Entropy coin?
What would that be worth?
Anna:
Exactly what the universe says it is.
No more, no less.
Bill (raising his glass):
To coherent currencies.
Riley:
To pegs that don’t snap like cheap boots.
Mira:
To stable coins that actually have something stable in them.
Anna:
To entropy — the auditor that never gets fooled.
Adam:
And to beer — still the only fully-backed asset in this pub.
They drink.
Fade out.
Ceteris Paribus 