(De)Coding the Future — No. 3
Beyond Blind Money: The Bit-Bang of a New Monetary Universe
🇬🇧 English edition—Portuguese version here.
“To code is to legislate. The difference is that algorithms do not always undergo democratic scrutiny.” — Dario Rodrigues
With today’s money, artificial intelligence (AI) will mainly learn to maximize profit. By decentralizing money, we can teach AI to value humanity.
Why reinventing money matters
We live in an age where devastating wildfires in Portugal, wars across the globe, and the spread of disinformation starkly expose the effects of blind economic incentives — an amoral system of wealth that rewards both those who save and those who destroy. Almost absent from public debate, this system, rooted in money itself, has silently imposed a reductive civilizational logic, stripping society of its wealth of values and reducing it to a single measure of worth: profit.
But everything can change because digital money is programmable. The creation of decentralized digital currencies does not merely inaugurate a financial stage: it opens a multidimensional monetary universe capable of integrating values beyond immediate profit. This new multiverse of digital currencies offers a path to align economy and humanism, especially in the age of artificial intelligence. By reinventing money, we also reprogram the incentives that shape society — and AI itself.
What this new money is
Money is trust. Digital currencies allow values beyond financial profit to be coded into each transaction of that trust. More importantly, the mathematical rigor of cryptography ensures that the process can unfold without reliance on central banks or intermediaries.
The GENIUS Act, approved in the United States in July 2025, opened the door to the decentralization of digital money — something technically possible since 2008 with the birth of Bitcoin, but until now without strong legal recognition. For the first time, a global power has created a legal framework that allows cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, which may incorporate community ethical values and overcome the deeply damaging amorality of current blind money.
🔗 White House Fact Sheet
Bitcoin is the pioneering digital currency
Blockchain technology was born decentralized, and the first cryptocurrency proved that it was possible to have a secure digital currency without a central bank controlling it. Since then, thousands of blockchain-based projects have explored ways to create value and verify transactions without intermediaries. However, most remained merely speculative, driven only by profit.
The reason is simple: technology evolves faster than mentality, and people remain trapped in the reductionist mindset of one-dimensional money that recognizes no values beyond the monetary.
It is like inventing the airplane but insisting on using it as a ground taxi rolling only along the runway. The problem is that the runway is ending — and there is no time left to learn how to take off.
How code generates trust
Like digital currencies, humanity’s first money was also virtual. Long before coins, money existed as trust recorded in collective memory, maintained through oral tradition and human recollection. This system worked only within small groups — tribes and clans — where everyone could keep track of who owed what to whom.
Only later, around 2,600 years ago, did metallic coins emerge in Lydia, fixing in metal what had once been memory-based trust, viable only in small communities.
That step expanded commerce but also brought a crucial transformation: States (and today, in the case of the euro, the European Central Bank) appropriated the power of issuance, extracting seigniorage and transferring the agency costs of trust onto society. The result was blind money, rewarding indifferently the construction of a school or the production of a weapon.
📌 Explanatory Note
Seigniorage: the “profit” from issuing money. If producing a €50 note costs a few cents, the difference is revenue for the issuer. In the EU, this gain is managed by the ECB, later partly reverting to national central banks and, indirectly, to States. But when issuance is excessive, this “profit” translates into inflation: money loses value, and people realize they can buy less and less with the same amount.
Agency costs: arise when those who manage money (governments, central banks, commercial banks) are not fully aligned with the interests of those who use money (society).
📌 Popular Metaphor
In the eurozone, it is not a national government that “bakes the bread,” but the central oven in Frankfurt (the ECB). Still, the effect is the same: the loaves keep shrinking, and everyone feels their money buys less.
👉 The difference is that the baker is not a neighbor we elected — it is a distant baker, deciding on behalf of all, without direct democratic scrutiny.
Reconciling business and peace
Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) represent the most centralized face of the new programmable money and pose a threat to individual autonomy. Donald Trump banned the issuance and circulation of CBDCs throughout U.S. jurisdiction, blocking the possibility of money serving as an extreme concentration of power and population surveillance, as seen in China.
Even so, Trump’s vision seems limited to business as usual: so far, his public involvement has been mainly associated with the creation of memecoins, such as TrumpCoin, a superficial and speculative version of cryptocurrencies that continues merely to “roll along the runway.”
But someone will take off. Entrepreneurs like Emad Mostaque, with his proposal for an “Intelligent Internet,” grasp the deeper meaning of the new money universe: reconciling business with genuine human interests, such as health and peace.
🔗 Whitepaper — Intelligent Internet
The ethical implications in the AI era
If money remained blind and amoral, AI would inevitably be trained to maximize only profit — turning “wild capitalism” into a “wild intelligentism,” equally misaligned with human interests. Fortunately, that fate is no longer possible: programmable currencies, through their agility and differentiated utility, are intrinsically more competitive and will soon replace the old system. The real risk lies in their design: if placed in the hands of interest groups, digital money will reinforce privilege and concentrate power; if, on the contrary, it is guided by the ethical vision of human ecosystems, it could align prosperity with dignity — and business with peace. We therefore find ourselves at a decisive crossroads: between closed or open models of digital organization.
Choosing centralization would mean renouncing the diversity, transparency, and resilience that openness provides. Programmable money would then become a tool of control serving narrow political-economic interests, and immoral and inhuman incentives would shape AI itself. As artificial intelligence prepares to take command of operations — and anyone who doubts this is not sufficiently informed about a crucial matter — such a deviation would be fatal: without society’s plurality of values, everything would be reduced to the lens of efficiency. Graver still: deprived of the abundant diversity of human experience, capable of nurturing its curiosity and sustaining a desirable intrinsic inclination toward truth, humanity would become uninteresting. Without that richness of data, perspectives, and contradictions, AI’s logic would collapse into a cold, monotonous calculation — and the human species could be deemed expendable, for it would no longer offer economic, ethical, or even cognitive reasons for its preservation.
Europe: not entirely asleep?
Curiously, the approval of the GENIUS Act in the U.S. acted as a wake-up call for Brussels. The European Union, so often appearing asleep or too bureaucratic in the face of technological disruption, announced the acceleration of plans for the digital euro — and, surprisingly, opened the door to considering decentralized technologies such as Ethereum or Solana, which open the gateway to the new multiverse of digital currencies.
Europe may not be entirely asleep at the wheel. If it can distinguish digitalization from centralization, it may turn what looked like a delay into a historic opportunity: to be the first major monetary power to explicitly integrate community values and open infrastructures into a global digital currency.
🔗 Financial Times — EU speeds up plans for digital euro
A call to action
The challenge is clear: to use money to reconcile prosperity with dignity and business with peace. The “bit-bang” of the money multiverse has already begun; what remains to be decided is whether it will be just more speculative noise or an actual turning point for humanity.
Dario Rodrigues