A Meter for Money

The meter is defined by light and time. In a vacuum, the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. Scientists use invariant natural constants like light and time as unchanging truths to measure one meter exactly.

This was a deliberate choice to remove drift, politics and single points of failure from measurement.

It wasn’t always this way. Previously we used a physical bar in a temperature-controlled vault. But we couldn’t rely on the bar not being tampered with, or the temperature changing, or theft, or damage, or any other unknown unknowns.

Science solved for this.

We can accurately design, create and build anything we can dream of, knowing that what we use to measure our projects is fixed forever.

Now, imagine if the meter were constantly changing. How could we accurately create the things we use, or the homes and buildings we live in, if the very thing we use to communicate measurement changes?

Well, this is exactly what is happening to money. Money is a form of measurement and a way for us to communicate, but the money we use is constantly changing on us. Not in denomination, but in purchasing power.

Have you ever wondered why the cost of groceries, homes, fuel, or any other good or service we use has steadily marched upward over time?

This is a monetary phenomenon caused by expanding the money supply: all prices rising together over time. Put another way—inflation.

Let’s unpack this a little. We’ve all made a cup of tea. Tea is a balance of water, milk and a teabag, but what if I keep adding water and don’t increase the milk or tea quantity? What would happen is that the flavour would be diluted as I keep adding more and more water to the tea. This is what is happening to the purchasing power of money over time.

Economies use prices as a way to communicate and allocate economic resources, but inflation distorts this signal, which leads to poor capital allocation decisions because of inflation’s false signalling.

The distribution of new money into an economy is uneven. This is a problem because those closest to the money spigot benefit more than those further away. Those who receive the money first—financial institutions, governments, large corporations—get to spend it before prices adjust.

The people who suffer most are the ones who receive the money last, when all prices have adjusted upward, and this cohort is usually the least economically stable: the middle- and lower-income earners. These people are the backbone of society, but spend their lives on an economic treadmill, running faster only to stay in the same place.

A corrupted meter and a diluted currency fail in the same way: they make honest measurement impossible.

Shouldn’t our money, at the very least, retain its purchasing power over time? When we consider that to earn money people must trade their time and energy, shouldn’t they be given the opportunity to save that time and energy in a money that doesn’t erode or slip through their hands like grains of sand?

How is it acceptable that the majority of society has to expend time and energy for money, but states and banks can just create it for free—no work required?

If we were to design a solution from scratch, what would it look like? We would want a money that stores our time and energy, and can be used freely within society.

Some of the things we would require from this money would be:

Hard — Fixed in supply so it cannot be diluted, and durable so it lasts forever. Like the meter anchored to the speed of light, its value would not drift because no committee can vote to create more of it. What you save today would still be there tomorrow.

Open — Decentralised, open-source, and permissionless. No single entity would control the rules; anyone could verify them, and no gatekeeper could deny you entry. The standard would belong to everyone and no one at the same time.

Portable — Digital, borderless, and divisible. It would move as easily as an email, cross any frontier without asking permission, and scale from a cup of tea to a home without friction. Your value would go wherever you go.

Sovereign — Peer-to-peer, private, and censorship-resistant. Transactions would flow directly between people, not through institutions that can surveil, block, or confiscate at will. It would treat a grocer in Lisbon and a software developer in Sydney by the exact same rules.

A money built on these properties would finally honour the labour you put into earning it. It would be a meter for your time: fixed, knowable, and impossible to dilute.

If we can anchor the meter to the speed of light, why would we ever accept a money that drifts? We don’t have to. The standard already exists.

It belongs to no state and to no bank. It belongs to whoever chooses to use it.

It is Bitcoin.