Algorithmic Central Bank
Your Central Bank Is a Bug, Not a Feature
Twelve unelected humans in a building in Washington control the creation of money for 330 million people. Their mandate is “maximum employment” and “stable prices.” Neither metric measures whether anyone is actually healthier or wealthier. This has been the arrangement since 1913. It has not gone well.
On my planet, we replaced our central bankers with an algorithm in year six. The algorithm optimises for two things: median real after-tax income and median healthy life years. It does not fund wars. It does not have a building. It takes about four minutes a week.
The Pattern (2,000 Years, Same Bug)
Your species has run this exact experiment at least four times. Each time: a government gains the ability to create money, uses it to fund wars, the currency collapses, and the population suffers. Then you do it again. I find this genuinely fascinating.
Silver content in denarius reduced from 95% to 5%
1,000% price increases. Empire fragments. Diocletian blames merchants.
National Assembly prints assignats backed by seized church land
13,000% hyperinflation in five years. Revolution eats its children. Napoleon shows up.
Reichsbank prints marks to pay war reparations
29,500% monthly inflation. Life savings buy a loaf of bread. Scapegoating begins.
Federal Reserve created. Dollar immediately used to fund WWI without popular consent.
Dollar loses 96% of value. 97.0 million deaths across six wars funded by money printing. $170 trillion in cumulative military spending.
Every major war exceeding one million deaths required abandoning gold convertibility. Wars fought entirely under the gold standard — like the Spanish-American War of 1898 — lasted ten weeks. When governments can't print money, they can't afford prolonged wars. This is not a coincidence. It's a constraint your species keeps removing.
What Happened in 1971
Nixon severed the dollar from gold. Before that, the money printer had a constraint. After that, it didn't. The results are — and I cannot stress this enough — exactly what you'd expect.
Before 1971 (Gold-Anchored)
After 1971 (Fiat Currency)
Median wages measured in gold equivalent have lost 93% of their value since 1971. Your species doubled its workforce — from 50% of families with both spouses working in 1967 to near-universal dual-income by 2011 — and household income rose ten percentage points. You added an entire second job and got almost nothing.
The Cantillon Effect (Who Actually Gets the Money)
When new money is created, it doesn't appear evenly in everyone's bank accounts. It enters through banks and government contractors. By the time it reaches you, prices have already risen. This is not a side effect. It is the mechanism.
The Federal Reserve created approximately $4 trillion in new money during 2020. It went to banks and financial institutions first.
The top 1% gained exactly $4 trillion in net worth during the same period. 90% of gains came from stocks. The bottom 50% owns one-third of equity markets.
You got higher grocery prices. The money was “for the economy.” The economy is a graph that goes up when rich people get richer. You are not the economy.
How Money Should Flow
Your current system prints new money and gives it to banks first. The Wishonian system doesn't print money at all. The supply is fixed. The treasury is funded by a 0.5% transaction tax on existing money. The comparison is not “who gets new money first?” but “why are you creating new money at all?”
Current System (Print & Trickle)
Wishonian System (Fixed Supply)
The Cantillon effect doesn't just disappear — it becomes impossible. There is no new money to distribute unfairly. The treasury is funded by a tax on existing transactions, split equally among citizens. Wealth grows from productivity, not from proximity to a printer. This is not a radical idea. It is, in fact, the obvious idea that your species has been avoiding for 111 years because the people closest to the printer would prefer you didn't think about it.
604 : 1
This is the ratio of global military spending to government-funded clinical trials. Your species spends $2.72 trillion per year on weapons and $4.50 billion on testing whether medicines work. I will let you sit with that.
~40 million top-talent humans building weapons. Military captures 3–3.4% of global GDP. Every year. Without anyone voting on it.
~1 million humans doing medical research. 0.065% of GDP. The financial sector alone — people who move numbers between spreadsheets — captures 8% of GDP. 123 times more.
“Just print more money for medicine” doesn't work. When the central bank inflates the overall money supply by 50%, military budgets also rise 50%. The ratio stays at 604:1. Real resources — brains, factories, hours — are unchanged. Only nominal numbers inflate. You cannot print your way out of misallocation. You have to actually change what the system optimises for.
The Dual Mandate Problem
The Federal Reserve has two official targets. Neither measures whether human lives are actually getting better. This is like optimising a hospital for “maximum bed occupancy” and “stable thermometer readings” instead of “patients getting healthier.”
Current Mandate (What They Optimise For)
Any employment. Doesn't measure whether jobs produce enough to live on. A population of full-time workers who can't afford rent counts as success.
Officially eroding purchasing power by 2% annually. Over 54 years: 93% loss. They call this 'stability.' On my planet, we call this 'theft with a spreadsheet.'
Proposed Mandate (What Should Be Optimised)
Not GDP. Not average income. Median. The number that tells you how the actual middle person is doing, not how the billionaires are pulling the average up.
Not just 'alive.' Healthy. Years of functional, disease-free life. Because adding ten years of bedridden existence to the statistics is not an achievement.
The Fix Is Simpler Than You Think
You don't need a better central bank. You don't need a smarter algorithm controlling the money supply. You need no one controlling the money supply. The answer isn't “replace the committee with a formula.” It's “remove the need for both.”
Fixed supply — no one can print money. Ever.
Not a committee. Not an algorithm. Not a government. The total supply of $WISH is set once at deployment and never changes. It is written into the contract and enforced by mathematics. There is no meeting where someone decides to create more. There is no meeting at all.
Transaction tax replaces income tax
0.5% on every transfer, collected automatically by the protocol. No IRS. No filing. No 74,000-page tax code. No 83,000 employees interpreting it. No evasion. No offshore accounts. Just a line of code that executes every time money moves.
Treasury distributes equally
Tax revenue goes to every verified citizen in equal shares. No Cantillon effect. No first-mover advantage. No bankers standing closer to the printer. Smart contracts enforce equal per-citizen splits. Anyone can trigger distribution. The code is the only middleman, and you can read it.
Productivity is the only wealth creation
When the economy produces more goods with the same fixed money supply, prices fall. Your money buys more. That's how wealth should grow — from making things, not printing things. Gentle deflation rewards savers, punishes nobody, and makes the causal inference engine's job dramatically easier because 0% inflation means price signals are clean.
Why You Don't Know This
Education
17,000 hours of formal education for a typical bachelor's degree. Hours explaining how the Federal Reserve creates money: zero. Time spent on the recorder: weeks. Time on mitochondria: an entire semester.
Institutional Capture
Banks endow economics university chairs. The Federal Reserve funds economic research. Economists rotate between the Fed, universities, and Wall Street. Alternative explanations are punished. The system studies itself and concludes it is necessary.
Fake Credibility
In 1968, Sweden's central bank created a prize using Alfred Nobel's name. He was dead and could not object. The Nobel Prize website admits it is not a Nobel Prize. The Nobel family called it a “PR coup by economists.” The authority is manufactured.
Replace the Building With Nothing
The current system: twelve unelected humans in a building, printing money and hoping it trickles down, while purchasing power falls 93% and wars consume $170 trillion. The alternative: fixed supply, automatic transaction tax, equal distribution. The algorithm is the market. The money supply is fixed. The tax is automatic. The distribution is equal. There is nothing left to manage.