SΔϕ-34 — Money, Capital, and Default Power: Cost Editing and Structural Reproduction (v1.0)

This document extends the Sofience–Δϕ Formalism into the economic field by interpreting money and capital through the framework of default power. Money is not treated merely as a medium of exchange, unit of account, or store of value. Instead, it is defined as a generalized capacity for cost editing: a means by which paths become cheaper, rollback becomes materially possible, and exception persistence may be sustained. Capital, by contrast, is not understood simply as accumulated money, but as a structure of default reproduction: a system that stabilizes favorable continuations across time while raising the rollback and re-entry costs of others. The distinction is therefore not quantitative but structural. Money alters the cost of movement within an existing field; capital reproduces the field in a way that repeatedly favors selected paths. Money can purchase continuation. Capital determines which continuations become normal. In this sense, money and capital belong to different layers of path power: money operates as movable leverage, while capital operates as self-reproducing path advantage. This document situates economic mediation within the broader SΔϕ architecture of irreversibility, rollback, exception re-entry, closure, and editability. Its central claim is simple: money edits paths; capital reproduces them.