A Letter to Ourselves — We Who Forgot the Essence of Money
I. Prologue: Where Did We Lose Our Way?
Today, humanity calls digital signals made of numbers and data “money,” believing them to be wealth and power. Banknotes and coins are mere shadows; all our exchanges now depend on digital records and signals.
Yet we have forgotten: money was never meant to be mere numbers. It began as a token of beholdenness—a record of someone’s generosity, of what was freely given and gratefully received. Wealth was not the accumulation of objects, but the circulation of relationships woven through gratitude.
Now we must ask again: how did we forget beholdenness, and become captive to indebtedness?
The answer lies in the origin of life — in humanity’s fundamental condition of lack or built-in scarcity. In nature, plants generate energy through chloroplasts. Animals, however, must extract energy from external matter using mitochondria.
Humans were born into this same "dependent nutrition" system(as heterotrophs — a system of dependent nutrition). Because we lacked self-sufficiency, we learned to desire what belonged to others — and to justify taking it.
Over time, this biological limitation solidified into a mindset of lack. Civilization took shape around competition, possession, and plunder, creating a structural economy of dependence.
And at the heart of this system was money — no longer a symbol of beholdenness, but a tool of control through indebtedness.
II. The Insight of Hwanung*: Remembering Shinshi**
Yet 6,000 years ago, some ancestors who followed the teachings of Hwanung discovered a different path for humanity.
They realized that scarcity is not an external reality but a limitation of inner perception. True abundance is born not from accumulation, but from giving and re-giving(sharing).
They opened a new path. They built Shinshi, the radiant “economy of circulation,” founded on beholdenness. It was a living system of relationships in which voluntary surrender and gratitude flowed naturally as energy through a communal ledger.
At the center of that economy stood the token of beholdenness. These were not instruments of ownership, coercion, or physical transaction — they were records of care.
Just as food or labor given to the community returned later as care, the token simply preserved and reminded people of this flow.
It carried the promise: “I have yielded for the sake of another. And you, too, shall yield for someone else.” This trust and this cycle were the true essence of communal wealth.
*Hwanung(桓雄): the ancient ancestor of Koreans. **Shinshi(神市): a divine city
III. The Inversion of Currency: From Beholdenness to Indebtedness
But once again civilization lost its way. When the issuing of tokens was taken from individuals and placed in the hands of so-called “trusted institutions,” money ceased to be a promise of community and became a tool of domination.
Initially justified as a safeguard against fraud, and later as a necessity for “public trust,” currency issuance became concentrated in the hands of the powerful few.
And with it came a profound inversion: money could now be created without any giving. Power could now be exercised without any beholdenness.
As the original force of money—energy of voluntary sacrifice— was stripped away, they filled the void with phantom called “value.” And soon, the record of gratitude was replaced with the ledger of debt — indebtedness enforced by violence and law.
Credit — once another name for beholdenness — was now redefined. No longer a “negative(-) wealth”, it became an asset-like command over others as a “positive(+) wealth”. Thus, money ceased to be a symbol of appreciation and became a command of obligation — not a bridge of relationship, but a tool of subjugation.
Like sunlight mistaken for the sun itself, money is not wealth. Yet we still bow before false suns and hollow riches.
IV. The Declaration: Restoring Beholdenness and Opening the Gate of Infinite
We ask again: What is money?
We declare: Money is the memory of someone’s voluntary giving. It is the trace of beholdenness — nothing more, nothing less.
Humans are both private and public beings. Currency must serve as a medium of relational energy — not a substance of power.
We declare the restoration of the ethics of credit. Credit is not a number, but one of the deepest and most delicate promises shared between human beings. It breathes and grows only through gratitude and responsibility, through care and the giving-and-regiving of one another.
On this ethical foundation — through beholdenness to one another in gratitude — we pledge to rebuild finance, to reimagine the economy as a living circulation of creativity, and to shape a society where empathy and trust are not exceptions but the rhythm of everyday life.
What we seek is not a new currency. What we seek is a new architecture of relationship — one grounded in trust and care. Finance should mediate human connection, and credit should record not risk, but human stories and possibilities.
We reject: All structures of indebtedness that use money to dominate others, and every violent system that manipulates the phantom of “value.”
We recover: The circular flow of generosity and gratitude.
We build: A non-political, non-coercive, and non-extractive monetary system fit for the digital age.
The sun does not charge us for its light. No one pays to bask in sunshine. Light belongs to no one, and no one may hoard it.
Records are not wealth. Trust cannot be printed. Gratitude cannot be stored, only shared. Yet these — and these alone — are the forces through which true wealth flows.
We will remember Shinshi again. And through beholdenness to one another, we shall open the Gate of the Infinite.
“A new currency presupposes a new human being. And a new humanity will create a new currency.”
