Common questions about Commons Currency and how it compares to other monetary proposals and digital currency initiatives.
New to monetary economics? Many questions below assume understanding of how money actually works. If terms like "currency issuer vs. user" or "taxation drives demand" are unfamiliar, start with Understanding Money: How It Really Works for essential background.
Short answer: Stablecoins privatize public money creation, while Commons democratizes it.
The 2025 U.S. Stablecoin legislation (the "GENIUS Act") exemplifies why private stablecoins are fundamentally the wrong solution to global monetary problems. While stablecoins claim to innovate on digital money, they actually represent a massive transfer of public monetary authority to private corporations.
Stablecoins transfer seigniorage—the profit from money creation—from the public to corporations like Circle and Tether. These firms hold vast reserves in U.S. Treasuries, meaning taxpayers pay interest while issuers collect yield without risk exposure. Law & Liberty called it "the great stablecoin heist"—privatized money creation inconsistent with Congress's constitutional duty to coin money.
Commons approach: All seigniorage benefits belong to the public. When currency is issued, it's for public purposes through democratic governance, not private profit.
By legitimizing privately issued "digital dollars" while prohibiting a Fed-issued CBDC, the GENIUS Act outsources monetary sovereignty to corporations. This cements a corporate monopoly over digital money, replacing "public trust in currency" with corporate credit systems.
Commons approach: Democratic nations collectively govern the currency through one-nation-one-vote. No single entity—corporate or governmental—controls it.
Each stablecoin dollar is backed by Treasuries paying interest—so the government effectively subsidizes issuers with public debt payments while users earn no yield. This is a taxpayer-funded carry trade that enriches intermediaries while providing no public benefit.
Commons approach: No intermediary extraction. The currency serves users directly, with any system revenues flowing to public purposes.
Circle and Tether now rank among the top 20 foreign holders of U.S. Treasuries, rivaling small sovereign nations. This concentrates liquidity dependence on private tech firms, creating systemic fragilities analogous to shadow banks. If stablecoin issuers face runs, they could destabilize Treasury markets.
Commons approach: Built on public infrastructure with transparent reserves, democratic governance, and no single point of failure.
Banking associations warn that stablecoins could divert deposits from banks, undermining lending capacity. If consumers park money in stablecoins rather than deposits, the banking sector loses cheap funding for loans—hollowing out credit creation without offering an equivalent channel.
Commons approach: Works with local banking systems (see Financial Services), strengthening rather than replacing them.
Federal Reserve Governor Michael Barr warned that the Act's broad authorization of "digital asset service providers" enables regulatory arbitrage. Stablecoin issuers could behave like unregulated banks, reproducing vulnerabilities that caused early 20th-century bank panics.
Foreign issuers like Tether can evade provisions by incorporating offshore (El Salvador), operating in U.S. markets with lighter compliance—perpetuating money laundering risks.
Commons approach: Transparent blockchain with coordinated global regulation, impossible to hide illicit activity.
Stablecoins recreate the dynamics of public money through private profit channels. They're pegged to the dollar, so they don't solve dollar hegemony—they entrench it while extracting value to corporate shareholders.
Commons Currency creates genuinely new public money through democratic global governance. It replaces dollar hegemony with a neutral international currency, eliminates intermediary extraction, and serves the global public interest.
No. Bitcoin and Commons solve fundamentally different problems—and Bitcoin actually isn't money at all.
Bitcoin's vision: Apolitical, decentralized money beyond government control, with fixed supply enforced by code.
Commons vision: Democratic, governance-enabled money that serves human needs through collective decision-making.
Bitcoin treats money as a scarce commodity like gold. This is the commodity theory of money—and it's fundamentally wrong.
The commodity theory makes people think: "Money exists naturally (like gold in the ground), government collects it through taxes, then spends it." This leads to false beliefs:
Reality: Money is not a commodity. It's a system of credits and obligations. Government creates money when it spends, then taxes some back to create demand and control inflation. Taxes don't fund spending—they create currency demand.
Historical evidence proves this: For 5,000 years, money has been credit systems—Mesopotamian debt tablets, medieval tally sticks (used for 700 years!), temple accounting. The textbook story of "barter → gold money" is fiction. Anthropologists have never found it. Gold as money is the rare exception. Markets have always required government authority—they never emerged independently.
Bitcoin recreates the gold standard (which caused the Great Depression) while ignoring all of human monetary history. It's built on discredited commodity theory. The real constraint on economic activity is productive capacity (workers, materials, goods), not money supply.
For something to function as money, it must serve three purposes:
Bitcoin fails all three functions in practice, which is why after 15 years, virtually no one uses it as money.
Medium of exchange failure: Bitcoin processes only 7 transactions per second (Visa does 65,000). Transaction fees spike to $50+ during congestion. Settlement takes 10-60 minutes. You cannot run a modern economy on this. After 15 years, almost no merchants accept Bitcoin because it simply doesn't work for commerce.
Unit of account failure: Bitcoin's price swings 10-20% daily. No business can operate when their pricing unit changes value wildly. Even Bitcoin enthusiasts price things in dollars and convert—proving it's not functioning as a unit of account. When El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender, businesses still price in dollars and just accept Bitcoin at current exchange rates.
Store of value failure: Something that drops 70% in value repeatedly is not a store of value—it's speculation. Real stores of value are stable. Bitcoin is wildly volatile. Its value depends entirely on finding someone willing to pay more than you did (the greater fool theory)—that's not a store of value, that's a pyramid scheme structure.
1. Deflationary Disaster
Bitcoin's fixed 21 million supply makes it inherently deflationary—and deflation is economically destructive:
2. No Counter-Cyclical Policy
As explained in Understanding Money, the real constraint on spending is productive capacity, not money supply. If you have unemployed workers and useful work to be done, you should be able to employ them.
Bitcoin makes this impossible. You cannot issue more Bitcoin to employ idle workers during recession. You cannot use Bitcoin for counter-cyclical fiscal policy. A Bitcoin-based economy would be permanently trapped in whatever unemployment rate results from rigid money supply—exactly the problem that modern monetary understanding solves.
3. No Inherent Value
As we explain in our monetary fundamentals, currency value comes from tax obligations. You need dollars to pay U.S. taxes. You need yen to pay Japanese taxes.
You need Bitcoin for... nothing. No government requires it for taxes. No obligations create inherent demand. It's pure speculation—a greater fool game where the only hope is selling to someone else for more.
4. No Governance = No Response to Crisis
Economies are dynamic systems facing changing conditions. When crisis hits, you need to adapt:
Bitcoin cannot do any of this. It has no governance mechanism by design. This might sound like a feature ("nobody can manipulate it"), but it's a catastrophic bug. A monetary system with no governance is like a ship with no steering—you're at the mercy of whatever happens.
5. Environmental Catastrophe
Bitcoin mining consumes approximately 150 terawatt-hours annually—more electricity than entire countries like Argentina or Norway. This massive energy use produces nothing of value:
At a time of climate crisis, we cannot afford to waste enough energy to power nations on a system that processes fewer transactions per second than a 1990s database.
Actual monetary problems facing the world:
None of these problems can be solved by a deflationary, ungovernable, energy-wasting speculative asset.
Bitcoin is not money. It's:
Bitcoin is many things, but it is NOT money, and it cannot solve any real economic problems.
→ Read the complete analysis: Why Bitcoin Is Not Money
| Aspect | Bitcoin | Commons Currency |
|---|---|---|
| Functions as Money? | No - fails all three criteria | Yes - designed for all three |
| Governance | None by design | Democratic assembly (one-nation-one-vote) |
| Supply | Fixed (21M) - deflationary | Managed to prevent both inflation and deflation |
| Backing/Value | None - pure speculation | ~200 national economies + tax obligations |
| Policy Tools | None - rigid protocol | Quotas, taxation, trade rebalancing |
| Scalability | ~7 TPS - unusable | Target: millions of TPS |
| Energy Use | 150 TWh/year - environmental disaster | Minimal - energy-efficient PoS |
| Actual Use Case | Speculation / crime | Medium of exchange for global trade |
| Enables Full Employment? | No - makes it impossible | Yes - explicitly designed for it |
| Solves Real Problems? | No - exacerbates them | Yes - addresses core issues |
The difference is fundamental: Bitcoin is built on a misunderstanding of how money works. Commons Currency is built on correct monetary economics.
CBDCs are a step in the right direction—digital currencies issued by central banks. But they have critical limitations:
Commons Currency ultimately aims to replace national currencies entirely, not coexist with them indefinitely. Having multiple currencies alongside Commons undermines the core benefits: you still have currency speculation, competitive devaluations, and conversion friction.
What happens to national monetary institutions? Central banks, treasuries, and finance ministries don't disappear—they transform. Instead of issuing national currency, they issue Commons Units within their democratic quotas. Instead of managing USD or EUR reserves, they manage CU. Instead of independent monetary policy, they participate in coordinated global governance.
National CBDCs might serve as a stepping stone—helping countries digitize their monetary systems and build technical capacity before full adoption. But the institutional knowledge and infrastructure transitions into operating within the Commons Currency framework rather than being discarded.
Decades of reform attempts have failed because the fundamental architecture is unreformable.
Just as the Articles of Confederation couldn't be reformed into a functional U.S. government (requiring a new Constitution), the Bretton Woods system can't be reformed into a just global monetary order—it requires replacement.
Initially, perhaps. But network effects favor adoption.
It doesn't require all 200+ countries to join at once. Start with:
As the network grows, the benefits compound:
Historical parallel: When the U.S. dollar replaced gold standard, it didn't happen overnight. It took decades of gradual adoption driven by superior utility.
SDRs were Keynes's bancor proposal watered down to the point of uselessness.
| Aspect | SDRs | Commons Currency |
|---|---|---|
| Accessibility | Only central banks | Everyone (citizens, businesses) |
| Voting | Weighted by economy size | One-nation-one-vote |
| Transparency | Opaque | Fully transparent blockchain |
| Rebalancing | None | Automatic surplus recycling |
| Usage | Rarely used | Day-to-day transactions |
SDRs are a reserve asset, not a currency. You can't buy coffee with SDRs. Commons is designed to be an actual medium of exchange.
The end goal is for Commons to become the sole global currency, replacing national currencies entirely. This is how you truly eliminate currency speculation, competitive devaluations, and conversion friction.
However, transition will be gradual and voluntary:
Timeline: This could take 10-30 years. Some countries (especially those with weak/volatile currencies) may adopt quickly. Others may take longer. But the direction should be clear: one world, one currency.
Why full adoption is the goal: Maintaining multiple currencies defeats the purpose. You still have forex speculation, currency crises, competitive devaluations, and conversion costs. The system only achieves its full potential when Commons is universal.
The most important mechanism: Commons Currency assesses inflationary impact BEFORE creating money, not after. This predictive approach prevents inflation rather than merely reacting to it.
Multiple layers of protection work together:
Key insight: Inflation happens when currency creation exceeds real productive capacity. Commons ties issuance to economic fundamentals, models impact beforehand, and uses taxation for fine-tuning when needed.
No. Privacy is built-in by design.
See Privacy & Security for technical details on how this is achieved.
Commons is designed for universal accessibility:
Many Africans leapfrogged landlines straight to mobile money (M-Pesa). Similarly, Commons can leapfrog traditional banking infrastructure.
This is where taxation is critical (see Global Tax Coordination).
When member nations require taxes to be paid in Commons Units, this creates immediate inherent demand. Everyone in those countries needs CU to fulfill their legal tax obligations, establishing a floor value.
Additionally:
That's the current IMF system, and it's precisely the problem.
The IMF's weighted voting gives the U.S. effective veto power and lets rich nations impose conditions on poor ones. This is monetary imperialism, not cooperation.
One-nation-one-vote is the foundation of international democracy. At the UN General Assembly, Liechtenstein and China each have one vote. Same principle applies here.
Safeguards against abuse:
Realistically, 5-10 years from serious commitment to operational system.
See Implementation Roadmap for phased approach:
For comparison, the Euro took nearly a decade from Maastricht Treaty (1992) to physical currency (2002). Commons is more ambitious but also has more urgent need.
Short answer: Everyone who believes their work and contribution deserve economic dignity.
Commons Currency is built on the principle that economic security is a fundamental human right—not a privilege reserved for those whose jobs survive automation. Drawing from Franklin Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights (1944), we believe every person has the right to meaningful work, fair compensation, healthcare, education, and freedom from economic fear.
As automation reshapes the economy, millions will lose jobs through no fault of their own. But technological disruption doesn't have to mean economic devastation. With the right systems, AI and automation can free humanity to tackle our greatest challenges: building infrastructure, advancing science, teaching, caring for communities, restoring the environment—work that matters but current market systems undervalue.
Commons creates space for that transition. Not through handouts, but by recognizing that economic value comes from contribution to society, not just market wages. Your skills, your experience, your perspective—they all matter in building the economic future our children deserve.
Currently, Commons Currency is an open proposal seeking input from economists, technologists, policymakers, and citizens globally. It synthesizes ideas from:
The intellectual foundation combines heterodox post-Keynesian economic thinking with a spiritual vision of global unity. The economic tradition emphasizes real-world institutional dynamics over abstract market equilibria, recognizing that money is endogenous (created by credit), economies are inherently uncertain, and power relations matter. The spiritual tradition recognizes that humanity's path toward maturity requires transcending narrow nationalism and building institutions that serve our common welfare.
The goal is to build a broad coalition—not owned by any single entity but governed collectively by participating nations.
Explore the full proposals:
Contribute your expertise:
Contact: join@commonscurrency.org