"How is it that you work so much, and yet have no money?"
The audience learns half-way through the series (Port of Lies) that the public defender's father commited a murder very similar to the main storyline in the past. Whereas the main storyline follows an exploited Indonesian worker's murder of a Taiwanese ship captain, the case in the past was a Taiwanese/Aboriginal worker to a Chinese ship captain. Is it Taiwanese "turn" to be the exploiter now?
On some level I think the series attempts to depict that there is an never-ending cycle of exploitation, but considering the circumstances that Taiwan aborigines have gone through, this statement drives home the heart of "fiat bullshit" rather than some moral compass/character flaw that's gone awry.
While the series only follows one aboriginal tribe in Taiwan, I believe the story is reflected throughout the tribes (there are many!). For the many centuries that natives （原住民）, or as the main character snarkedly prefers, "前地主" (former land owners) have worked under the many flags Taiwan has flown throughout the centuries, the money they earn always ends up worthless.
Whether or not it is the Dutch colonists who forced trade in Florins by gunpoint, then onto the Qing's silver, gold ingots after the Dutch left, then Qing's paper claims on land which then the Japanese colonists would do away with by introducing the expanding Japanese Empire's Yen, then after WWII when the retreating Chinese nationalists blew up everyone's savings hyperinflating whatever currency that was left in the midst losing their Civil War... It's hard to imagine any scenario where an aborigine had any chance for saving the value they worked for that they can keep.
The lesson here outside of the "cycle of exploitation" is that if you aren't using the money of the authority "in power" you have no money to show for no matter how hard you worked.
It sounds hopeless when putting it like that. Perhaps that is why many turn to alcoholism when there's no possibility for upward social mobility through work, then that behavior perpetuates throughout society and before you know it a generation of prejudice against the alcoholic-illiterate 山胞 (mountain people) emerges.
This scene has no answer to this question. All the adults have no response to why they have no money after they worked so hard, the flashback scene ends.
Bitcoin fixes this! My personal thesis is that Bitcoin is made in Taiwan and has a real shot at breaking this cycle of exploitation. Afterall, whether or not it is mining chips or chips for memory or storage, network equipment, or even obscure tooling for mounting hardware and material, all the bits and pieces of Bitcoin we can touch in the physical world have passed through the hands of some Taiwanese.
How poetic would it be that a country not recognized on the world stage be the one to help introduce state-less currency?