A Thousand Small Mints
A story written by Pete Kaminski with ChatGPT 5.2 (January 2026), set in a near-future authoritarian state where centralized finance has become a tool of control. A field tech named Mara enters a mutual credit network — trust-routed, personally minted, synced over Nostr — and discovers that the thing the regime is trying to nationalize isn't money. It's relationships.
Full text: A Thousand Small Mints (Full Text)
In This Conversation
Pete invoked it during the Regenerative Economics and Currencies discussion:
Pete: "Do you know this story, A Thousand Small Mints?"
The Nameless One: "Yes."
Pete: "That architecture is the right way to do it. I think that was the first story I wrote with AI, where I was trying to explain a technical concept, and the technical concept and the story ended up disjoint."
Pete noted that his next story, Lark and Mara Cross the River, improved on this by keeping the story and the technical spec together.
The Architecture
Reading the story reveals how deeply it connects to the patterns discussed in the call:
- Every person is their own mint. Trust limits are personal, bilateral, adjustable — the same pairwise pattern Pete described for IFP disclosure tiers.
- Payments route through chains of trust. If Mara trusts Jae, and Jae trusts a vendor, Mara can pay the vendor through Jae. No central authority required. This is the same topology Pete described for agent-to-agent negotiation.
- A web of webs, not a single ledger. When the state cracks down, Jae's response is compartmentalization: "You don't need one giant network. You need many overlapping small ones. Cells. Villages. Bridges only where necessary." This is exactly the circles pattern from the call.
- Trust refused is the enforcement. Bad actors aren't punished by courts or violence — the web routes around them. This anticipates The Nameless One's concept of proof of worthiness: you earn access through demonstrated trustworthiness, not through accumulation.
- Nostr is named explicitly as the sync substrate — signed messages, multiple relays, redundant witnesses. The story makes the connection between Nostr's relay architecture and mutual credit that the call only gestured at.
- "Credit like a garden, not a faucet." Jae's metaphor echoes Jessie's circulation framework — value as something tended, not extracted.
Technical Background
The architecture in the story isn't fictional speculation — it draws from a real lineage of decentralized monetary design. Pete has been following this space since Ryan Fugger's early Ripple project (before it became the corporate-led XRP). A community of decentralized monetary architects continues to work in the "Classic Ripple" vein, coordinating through the rippleusers Google Group, building projects like Swaptacular, Villages.io, Rumplepay, Resilience, and Credit Commons.
The core insight these systems share with the story: every user is their own "mint" — you decide whom to trust and for how much. This is topological decentralization, where the network is a web of local trust rather than one giant global ledger. Bitcoin is trustless; this is trust-based. It's deceptively tricky at scale, which is where the routing and sync problems live.
The story's use of Nostr as a sync substrate also reflects real discussions in this community about using Nostr to provide a sync layer to Ripple-ish payment protocols. Pete's interest in Nostr's NIP process — the RFC-like collaborative standards iteration — fed directly into IFP's design.
For more detail, see Pete's Architectural and social aspects of mutual credit networks.
Why Pete Called the Architecture "Right"
When Pete said "that architecture is the right way to do it," he was pointing to the story's core technical insight: trust-based routing through personal bilateral credit lines, synced over a decentralized relay layer, with no global ledger and no central authority. This is the same architecture he's building into IFP — agents negotiating pairwise, discovering shared schemas, routing information through trust relationships.
Mentioned by: Pete Kaminski
Connection to the Manifesto
The Inter-Face Manifesto builds on the same architecture this story embodies. The manifesto's core design — each person runs their own agent, agents talk pairwise, trust is bilateral and progressive, there is no central authority — is the social-protocol version of the story's mutual credit network. The story's "web of webs, not a single ledger" is the manifesto's "decentralized by design." The story's trust-routing through chains of personal bilateral credit lines is the manifesto's progressive trust through disclosure tiers. Where the story's characters mint their own currencies, the manifesto's participants run their own agents.
Related
- Regenerative Economics and Currencies — the broader conversation this story illuminates
- Interface Protocol (IFP) — IFP's disclosure tiers and agent negotiation mirror the story's trust-routing
- Inter-Face Manifesto — builds the same architecture as a social protocol for AI agents
- Nostr — named in the story as the sync substrate
- Circles and Emergent Organization — "a web of webs" is the circles pattern
- The Angel Story — proof of worthiness as access, not purchase
- Circulation as a Metric — "credit like a garden"
- Lark and Mara Cross the River — Pete's next AI-written story, which improved on this one
- Pete Kaminski