Shipboard Reserve Economy

The shipboard reserve economy (SRE) operates on a form of fractional reserve banking. Overseen by the ship's purser at the behest of the local subdivision of the civilian government, the Reserve Bank of (ship name) keeps track of the income of each crew member aboard the named vessel in accounts tied to that individual's Vitreous Vitae in the form of 'virtual resource chips'. That income can be converted to a certain amount of physical resource chips for use in auto-fabricators or materials and cycles for auto-factories found aboard the ship, allowing the customer to make purchases as normal. However, this amount is pegged to the amount of free resources made available to the ship itself; a certain reserve of raw materials is held in reserve to ensure that these resources can be put to work in maintaining the ship in a working, habitable condition with a comfortable margin for error in case of emergencies.   While en route to a destination with more resources, such as an asteroid colony or habitable world, the remaining virtual chips can be spent on a variety of virtual assets, such as games, entertainment media, processing cycles on public servers, bandwidth on external communications systems, or even the creation of new HLAI. Virtual chips are not a cryptocurrency per se, as they exist primarily as records in a government-regulated archive, cannot be minted outside of the standardized legal processes, and are backed by the full faith and credit of the Protectorate via their civilian government representatives. At the destination, these virtual chips can be converted back into physical chips by way of local exchange offices via arrangements with the Protectorate government, though some truly remote outposts with similarly limited resources may require service from the spacecraft in return for exchange services (i.e. the delivery of encrypted media).   Virtual credits are subject to all the normal laws and regulations governing other monetary implements and contract law, but are also subject to the usual danger of monetary cybercrime attentant to valuable digital assets. Outright theft and fraud perpetrated by other spacers on the same vessel are uncommon, however, and such enclosed environments make keeping a secret extremely difficult. Messing with spacers' wages is a surefire way to ensure that 'accidents' involving the many pressure differentials and dangerous machinery found aboard spacecraft are more likely to occur, so shipboard governing authorities are strongly incentivized to ensure the shipboard economy functions in accordance with all the proper order that Protectorate citizens expect.