I felt this fit in with the "Economics" forum, but feel free to move as needed.
Charles Stross is one of my favorite science fiction authors, from the
never-lets-go-of-the-gas-pedal stories like
"Accelerando", to the more humorous like the
"The Atrocity Archives" - I can never get enough of this kind of writing.
The economic factor comes from the way this universe is structured. Aside from the radical idea that "fragile" humans are extinct, every person now is born into a debt they must work out of.
(Not of sovereign slavery as such, but for the cost of the technology that they consist of.) Entire structures exist that are used to service colossal sums over extreme time periods.
Starships require decades of work to raise capital and establish the debt framework and interest-repayment structure that will fund a colony seeking to establish a new home far away.
Large banks are connected by multi-light-year beams of gigawatt lasers to nearby systems. And as a nod to "bitcoin" there are cryptographic signing methods, and bitcoin is mentioned as a nod to a system that provides infrastructure to entire civilizations.
The story is entertaining, his writing is spot-on, and I felt the mention of bitcoin was more than just a reference to
"money encoded as bits", and more to the system that is being built and expanded upon now.
Mr. Stross is a former programmer, after all - he'd be able to understand how crypto-currencies work.
There's more to it all - especially when he goes into the definitions of fast, medium and slow money and the underlying uses, but I don't want to give it all away.
Amazon:http://www.amazon.com/Neptunes-Brood-Charles-Stross/dp/0425256774Read a sample:http://www.orbitbooks.net/excerpt/neptunes-brood/
