What if our universe is emergent on top of someone else's monetary system?
Every version of the simulation hypothesis I've seen assumes the substrate is computational: someone runs us the way we run software. I've spent years on a variant I find harder to dismiss, and it came from my day job, not from philosophy. I worked in finance and energy trading for most of my career, then in blockchain from around 2015. When you've watched a market die, you've seen an emergent universe get deleted.
What if our universe is emergent on top of someone else's monetary system?
Some things that would predict:
Our physics would look exactly the same. Physics observes what's inside the universe, not what the universe sits on. There's no experiment you can run from inside a position that tells you whose books you're on.
Deletion wouldn't be a power switch, it would be a market closing. A market that stops producing value gets shut down. The old open-outcry trading pits didn't explode when the business moved to screens. The room just stopped being written to.
Anomalies wouldn't look like glitches or rendering errors. They'd look like inflation nobody can explain, energy welling up from nowhere. From inside, a bubble in the layer underneath you would look exactly like that.
A bankrupt position is a black hole. It pulls down everything within reach, and an emergent system sitting on top can read the writing on the wall but has no power to stop it.
And emergence is layered. We already build economies and simulations on top of our own universe. Why assume we're the bottom of the stack, or that the layer below us is the bottom of theirs?
The question that actually keeps me up is strategic though. As a civilization gets loud (Kardashev-climbing, star-harvesting loud) it becomes visible to whatever it's emergent on. Should a civilization learn to see what's beneath it before it learns to be seen? Is that the real answer to Fermi, that everyone smart enough to become visible was smart enough not to?
Full disclosure: I've carried this since I first wrote it in a notebook years ago, and working on a film about it is what finally forced me to think it through. No links, per the rules, and this post is about the idea anyway. Poke holes in it: what would falsify a ledger-substrate versus a compute-substrate?