Five centuries of world currency, and why the next one has to run backwards.
For 500 years, every world currency has been backed by a hole in the ground, and the nation that ran the money was the nation that controlled the extraction. The carbon coin and lūna are the first anchors anyone has proposed that run the other way: money issued for putting things back, not for taking them out.
Drag the year bar, press play, or scroll through the eras. The bar follows you down the page, and the globe turns to each era's source. Rings mark where the anchor came out of the ground, squares where the money was run, and arcs show the flows between them.
1497
1497–1857
The piece of eight
Anchor: a stock of silver.
The Spanish dollar was the first coin the whole world took. It was dug out of a mountain in the Andes and the hills of northern Mexico, shipped east to Seville and west across the Pacific, and most of it ended up in China.
1497Spain reforms its coinage. The eight-real piece, the "piece of eight," becomes the standard.
1545The silver mountain at Potosí opens.
1546Silver is found at Zacatecas. Mexico becomes the other great source of the piece of eight.
1565–1815The Manila galleons carry Mexican and Peruvian silver from Acapulco to Manila, where it buys Chinese silk and porcelain.
MingChina moves its taxes onto silver. The empire becomes the world's silver sink, pulling in metal from both directions.
1821Mexico wins independence and keeps minting. The Mexican silver dollar carries on as a main trade coin in East Asia through the 1800s.
1857The US Coinage Act ends the Spanish dollar's run as legal tender in the United States.
Where it broke.Spain controlled the money supply and still went bankrupt again and again. The silver flowed straight through to the Dutch and the English, who had the workshops and the ships to sell Spain what it needed. Controlling the source of money is not the same as owning production.
1690s–1821
Brazilian gold
Anchor: a stock of gold, mined by Portugal, kept by England.
The same story again, with a different metal. Portugal owned the gold fields of Brazil. England owned the looms. The gold sailed home to Lisbon and kept going to London.
1690sGold is found in Minas Gerais, in Portuguese Brazil. A gold rush follows through the first half of the 1700s.
1703The Methuen Treaty. English wool cloth goes into Portugal, Portuguese wine comes into England, and Brazilian gold settles the difference.
1717Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint, sets the gold guinea at 21 shillings. Gold is overvalued against silver, silver leaves circulation, and Britain drifts onto gold in practice.
1821Britain makes it official (next card).
Where it broke.For Portugal, the same place it broke for Spain. Holding the mine bought imports, not industry. Brazilian gold helped give Britain the metal it later built sterling on.
1821–1931
Sterling
Anchor: a stock of gold.
Britain tied the pound to gold, and the rest of the trading world tied itself to the pound. The gold came, more and more, from the deep reef under Johannesburg; the price was set in London.
1821The UK resumes paying out gold for its notes after the Napoleonic Wars.
to 1914The classical gold standard. Enforced by the Royal Navy on the sea lanes and by the London bill market, which financed much of the world's trade.
1925Churchill, as Chancellor, puts Britain back on gold at the prewar parity.
1931Britain abandons gold for good.
Where it broke.A gold standard holds a currency to a fixed pile of metal while the economy around it moves. Restoring the 1914 price after a war that changed everything meant squeezing prices and wages down to fit the metal, until Britain stopped trying.
1931–1944: off gold, and nothing built to replace it yet.
1944–1971
Bretton Woods
Anchor: a stock of gold, held by one country.
The Allies met at a hotel in New Hampshire and rebuilt world money around the country holding the gold. Everyone else pegged to the dollar; the dollar pegged to the vault. The gold had been crossing the Atlantic for a decade.
1934The US revalues gold to $35 an ounce. Gold starts flowing in.
Late 1930sAs war approaches, European gold flees to the safety of New York and the new vault at Fort Knox.
1939–1941Britain pays for American war supplies in gold and dollars until Lend-Lease takes over.
July 1944The Bretton Woods conference. The dollar is fixed at $35 per ounce of gold.
1944Other currencies peg to the dollar instead of to gold directly.
1944The IMF and the World Bank are built to police the system and lend inside it.
1949The US holds 70 percent of the world's official gold, counting everyone but the Soviet Union.
Triffin's dilemma, 1960
The economist Robert Triffin pointed out the trap built into the design. The world needs ever more dollars to trade with. The only way to get them out is for the US to run deficits. And the more dollars pile up abroad, the less anyone believes they can all be swapped for the gold in the vault.
Run the money from one country and it has to choose: starve the world of money, or spend away the trust that makes it money. Every proposal on this page is measured against that trap.
1971–now
The petrodollar
Anchor: a flow of oil.
When the gold ran short, the dollar found a new hole in the ground. Not a stock this time, a flow: the world needs dollars because the world needs oil, and oil is sold in dollars.
15 Aug 1971Nixon closes the gold window. Foreign governments can no longer swap dollars for gold.
1973Major currencies float against each other.
1974A US–Saudi arrangement prices oil in dollars and recycles the oil surplus into US Treasuries.
Where it's going.The anchor is eroding at both ends. Sanctions push oil settlement off the dollar's rails, and the energy transition is shrinking oil's share of what the world competes for. A currency backed by a flow of oil weakens as the world needs less oil, which is exactly what the world has to do.
What comes next
Capacity and removal
Anchor: capacity and removal, not extraction.
Look back at the globe. Every era before this one had a hole at its center, one site the world's money depended on. This one has no center. It's made of hundreds of small sites, every farm, operator and plant that takes carbon back out of the air or adds real capacity to the network. Both proposals below pay for putting things back.
The carbon coin
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future
Central banks mint currency for every ton of carbon kept out of the air. Removal finally has a buyer, and the buyer is whoever runs the money.
Credit backed by real assets and network capacity. Issuance is spread across stakeholders, who can spend below zero against their seven-year average. ESTs can't be transferred: they're earned over seven reliable years and lost for unreliable ones.
Why they dodge Triffin.Both spread the power to issue instead of concentrating it in one sovereign. No single country has to run deficits to supply the world, because money is created wherever a ton is removed or capacity is added. The trap that broke Bretton Woods needs one issuer, and these designs don't have one.
The dots on the globe are illustrative, not a map of real projects.
Why this is the climate argument
For the whole history of money we have minted against digging things up: silver, then gold, then oil. Whoever controlled the hole controlled the currency, so every great monetary power had a reason to keep digging. The bill for those five centuries is in the atmosphere.
That's why the monetary system and the carbon problem are one subject, not two. As long as the world's money is a claim on extraction, the incentive to extract is built into the plumbing. An anchor that pays for removal flips the incentive at the same level it was set.
Space or the ground?
The two books aren't rivals. They're a sequencing problem, and energy sets the order. The numbers are the same ones on the roadmap:
25,000TWh a year to remove 10 Gt of CO₂ at 2.5 MWh per ton
~30,000TWh of world electricity today
~6005 GW power satellites at about 41 TWh a year each
Removal at full scale costs almost as much electricity as the whole world uses now. So the Earth levers come first, because they work on the clock we have: cutting methane, freeing up land, smarter nitrogen, carbon in soil. Orbital power and the Cislunar Commodity Exchange are the back half, for when removal at scale is what binds.
How the orbital system fails
EST holders live in orbit, and carbon labor on the ground becomes contractors to them. The issuing class and the working class end up on different planets.
A currency anchored to labor gets hollowed out when automation replaces the labor it's anchored to. If machines do the removal, the coin pays whoever owns the machines.
The middle class
A middle class hollows out when returns flow to the people who hold assets instead of the people who produce. Every anchor on this page so far rewarded holding: the mine, the vault, the oil field.
Both proposals go straight at that. The carbon coin pays whoever does the removal, not whoever owns the most of it already. ESTs can't be bought at all; the only way to hold issuing power is to earn it by showing up, reliably, for seven years. That's the monetary version of the line on the roadmap: keep the gains where they're earned.
It isn't headcount
The UN's median projection has world population peaking around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s and then declining. Fertility is already below replacement across most of humanity. The number of people is not the fight.
The fight is consumption per person, and the shape of the transition: an aging, shrinking workforce arriving at exactly the moment automation can replace it. That's an argument for a production-and-removal anchor, not against one. When there are fewer workers and more machines, money that pays for what gets done, and for what gets put back, is how the gains reach people instead of just the owners of the machines.
Historical dates are real. The synthesis, and the reading of what comes next, are the author's. The carbon coin is from Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future; lūna and ESTs are from Daniel Suarez's Critical Mass. This is an unofficial reading, not affiliated with or endorsed by either author. Coastlines are simplified from Natural Earth.
Sources
Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, "Born with a 'Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade in 1571," Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995). Silver, the Manila galleons, China as the sink.
C. R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750 (University of California Press, 1962). Minas Gerais gold and its route to England.
Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton University Press). Newton's 1717 rating, the classical gold standard, 1925, 1931, Bretton Woods.
David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Cornell University Press, 1999). The 1974 Saudi arrangement.