** Money that truly grows on trees **
- Julian Dibbell, Feed Magazine
I'd like to see money grow on trees. Here's how it might work: You would buy your money tree at a licensed nursery or other financial institution. You could pot it and stand it in a sunlit hall, or you could plant it in the backyard, as space and landscaping plans allowed. A money tree would be an intricate and lovely thing.
The product of intense genetic engineering, the tree would bear fruit according to precise, chemically coded commands released from a sealed plant-food box buried in the midst of its root system. The box would have a network connection to your bank, which would fund the tree at your request by transferring money from your account to the food box. A logic chip inside the box would translate dollar amounts into plant-food doses, stimulating the tree to produce fruit proportionate in total biomass to the money vested in it.
Once harvested, the fruit could be taken to any nearby genetic-assay machine (found in bank lobbies, supermarket produce sections, etc.), which would pulp it, analyze it for DNA markers identifying it as a financial instrument backed by your bank, and convert it back into cash. Seedless and difficult to clone, the fruit could also be offered directly to others in exchange for goods and services. It would be legal tender for all debts, public and private. It would be money, and it would grow on trees.
The money tree would also be an investment, of sorts. Food doses would be calculated so that the value of the fruit when ripe would, with any luck, exceed the amount transferred into the tree earlier in the year, perhaps by as much as 8 percent annualized. Typically, though, weeds, bugs, birds, bad weather or the like would limit returns to 4 or 5 percent (tree bankers would make their cut on the spread between the maximum possible return and the average actual return). Also, you'd probably want to buy the bank's insurance against blight, fruit rustlers and other such catastrophes, thus further cutting into your upside.
As an investment, therefore, the money tree would be no great shakes. As a status symbol, however, it would shine. Its fruit would have a distinctive look - I imagine a smooth, intensely glossy skin, colored in deep, mottled greens and yellows, with variations in hue and shape depending on the denomination. There would be no mistaking a $100-a-gram tree (commonly known as a Benjamin tree) from its $10-a-gram cousin (Monetaria sawbuckus), and of course it would be 10 times as beautiful to behold.
The tree would thus instantly project its owner's wealth, but more than that, it would project a stylishly organic relationship to that wealth. In an age at last grown weary with the increasing speed and abstraction of its money, the money tree would symbolize patient investment in things of concrete, human value. It would stand in contradiction to the usual connotations of money growing on trees, suggesting instead that money does not come easy - that its growth requires thoughtful nurturing, daily care and a thorough grounding in the earthy realities of physical existence. It would be especially popular with derivatives traders, software moguls and others whose wealth in fact rests entirely on electronic blips and lightning-fast turnarounds.
The money tree would be a great conversation piece. And many who might find an outright gift of cash distasteful would accept its fruit with pleasure. Recipients could tastefully display the fruit on mantelpieces and coffee tables; they could savor its beguiling scent (said merely to hint at the deliciousness of the flesh itself) as they carried it to the bank for deposit.
And for the superrich, the money tree would open up a whole new dimension in after-dinner entertainment. In ancient Mexico, where cocoa beans were currency, chocolate was a drink enjoyed exclusively by the nobility; so too, in a world where money trees were de rigueur, it would be the privilege of postindustrial aristocracy to serve up slices of one?s net worth with the cheese and port.
Guests might be tempted, of course, to wrap up their dessert in a napkin and slip it into a purse or pocket, but only the hopelessly gauche would succumb. The proper guest would chew on the fruit lingeringly and, especially if he or she had never tasted money before, with a look of knowing appreciation. And if the flavor were in fact not all it was cracked up to be - well, who at the table would dare to say so?
- Julian Dibbell is the author of My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World.
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