Money Nobody Controls Let's design the perfect money and see if it could ever work.

Every money has had a boss

In Part 2 we imagined Fixedland, where nobody could create new money. The closest America ever came was the gold standard. But even gold had a boss.

On April 5, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered Americans to turn in their gold coins and bars. People were paid $20.67 an ounce. The next year the government raised the official price to $35. The gold people had handed over was suddenly worth about 70% more, and the government kept the difference.

The lesson isn't really about gold. Whoever holds the gold, or runs the bank, or decides how many dollars to make, can change the rules. Sometimes that's useful, like rescuing banks in a panic. Sometimes it costs regular people.

So here's a fun question: could you design money with no boss at all?

Let's design it

Grab a napkin. Here's our wish list:

1. Nobody can make more

   The total is set at the start. Not a president, not a bank, not even the inventor can add more.

2. Nobody can fake it

   No counterfeits, and no spending the same money twice.

3. No bank needed

   Send it to anyone, anywhere, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, the way you'd hand someone cash.

4. Anyone can check

   No secret vault. Anybody can count exactly how much exists.

The first four rows are the dream. The last three are the catch. Keep them in mind.

The copy problem

To send money across the world, it has to be digital. And anything digital can be copied. Text a photo of your dog to 50 people and all 50 have it. If money worked like that, you could spend the same dollar 50 times.

Banks solve this by keeping the one official list of who owns what. That's exactly why we need them, and why they get to be the boss. For decades, every attempt at digital cash ended up needing a company in charge.

The trick: everybody keeps the notebook

So here's an idea. What if there were no official list in a vault? What if everybody kept a copy?

Picture a notebook that records every payment ever made. Now picture thousands of identical copies on computers all over the world. When you pay someone, all of them hear about it. Every few minutes a new page gets added, and thousands of computers check every line against the rules. Try to spend the same money twice and they reject it.

Nobody owns the notebook. To change the rules, you'd need nearly everyone running a copy to agree, which almost never happens. A government could shut down some of the computers and the rest would keep going.

Who adds the pages? Anyone can. But first they have to do a lot of hard computer work. That makes cheating very expensive. As a reward, whoever adds a page gets a few brand-new coins. That's the only way new coins are made.

A schedule nobody can change

How many coins should there be? Here's the plan. New coins come out on a schedule written into the rules, and every four years the amount gets cut in half. Fast at first, then slower, then a trickle, until it stops at a hard limit. A page with even one extra coin gets rejected by everyone else.

No surprise gold rush. No meeting where somebody decides to make more. You'd know the total supply a hundred years ahead.

Sounds amazing

Money nobody can print or fake. Send it to anyone on Earth without asking a bank. Count every coin yourself.

But wait.

Fixedland, for real

Remember Part 2? Bitcoin is close to Fixedland money, and even stricter, because its supply stops growing completely. Supporters expect that to make each coin buy more over time. So far, though, its price has been driven mostly by how many people want it, in huge swings.

Part 2's bad side applies too, including its worst case: the panic with no brakes. A hard limit can't fix that, and nobody knows yet how capped money would behave in a real crisis. That's a big reason most economists prefer a little steady inflation. It gives a central bank room to fight a panic. Debts in Bitcoin would also get heavier over time.

One big difference: nobody has to switch. One of the hardest parts of Part 2 was forcing a whole country to change overnight. Bitcoin runs alongside the dollar. You can use it or ignore it.

The honest problems

• The price swings hard

  From late 2021 to late 2022 it fell about 75%. Anyone who needed that money that year got hurt. That's the "steady value" row.

• Lose your key, lose your money

  There's no bank to call and no password reset. Several million coins are believed lost for good. That's the "undo a mistake" row.

• Early birds got the most

  Part 2 said nobody in Fixedland gets new money first. Bitcoin's version of that problem is the early days. The first people running the computers got coins for almost nothing. Satoshi is believed to hold about a million coins that have never moved.

• Companies holding it have collapsed

  FTX, a huge exchange, went bankrupt in 2022 with customers' money inside. The coins weren't the problem. The company holding them was.

• It uses a lot of electricity

  That's the price of making cheating expensive. Critics call it waste. Supporters say miners chase the cheapest power, often power that would otherwise go unused.

• Scams are everywhere

  Anyone who contacts you first, promises to double your money, or asks you to send coins is a scammer.

Where it stands today: since January 2024, the SEC has allowed Bitcoin funds, so people can own it through an ordinary brokerage or retirement account. In March 2025 the U.S. government set up a Bitcoin reserve, using coins it had seized in criminal cases.