These are my thoughts about digital currency, and about what gives money its value at all.

Currencies like Bitcoin are often presented as a fix for what's wrong with money: no central bank, a fixed supply, rules that nobody can quietly change. I understand the appeal. But the more I thought about it, the less I believed the problem was where money is kept, or who controls the ledger.

What I keep coming back to is an old problem in a new shape: owning something is not the same as being able to use it, and a system can be perfectly correct and still fail the person it exists for.

This essay is also published on dev.to.

Money only works between people

Bitcoin has a fixed supply. There will never be more than about 21 million coins. That means they can concentrate in fewer and fewer hands.

But I don't think that concentration pays off the way it seems to. Imagine I owned every bitcoin in the world. Who would I pay? There would be nobody left on the other side of the transaction.

Money gets its value from interaction with the system around it. On its own, a balance is just a number. It means something only when another person will accept it in exchange for food, a home, a doctor's time.

There's a useful distinction here between nominal wealth (the number on the screen) and real wealth (what that number can actually get you). Concentration doesn't switch the network off. The software would keep running. But it hollows out the very thing that made the number worth having.

Ownership is not access

And that isn't only true of digital currency.

Money doesn't even guarantee survival now. In the United States, people can be shut out of healthcare and education. Some work a full-time job, or two, and still fall below what it takes to live. They have money, and it still isn't enough to reach the things they need.

So whether a currency is digital or physical, the actual value comes from access to resources, not from ownership. Money is a claim on the world. It is not the world itself.

The economist Amartya Sen made a related point in his capability approach: what matters is what a person is actually able to do and to be, not just what they hold. A wage that can't buy medical care isn't freedom on paper. It's the absence of it, measured in numbers.

A system can be correct and still be cruel

Physical money already fails people. In my view, it loses value through poor political decisions and a lack of ethical leadership, and when that happens the wider economy follows.

Moving money into software doesn't remove that. It turns law into software and hardware. And as anyone who builds software knows, a program can be perfectly valid and still fail, because the world it runs in is hostile to the people using it.

Think of a hospital scheduling system with no bugs at all. Every appointment is calculated exactly as specified. But if the specification puts people with the most complex needs at the back of the queue, the system will do that flawlessly, every day. Its correctness doesn't make it kind. It makes it reliable at the wrong thing.

Bitcoin's rules are enforced with remarkable consistency. That tells us the rules are being followed. It doesn't tell us whether following them leaves anyone better off.

Why the familiar option wins

There's another pattern I kept noticing. Mass adoption leads to popularity, just as it did for the biggest technology companies we all know.

That isn't always because they are the best. There are brilliant open-source alternatives to almost everything. But bigger companies have more money for marketing, more distribution, more integrations, and a head start that makes switching feel costly. Being familiar, and endorsed by the institutions around you, counts for a lot. Popularity is not the same as quality.

And most people spend their whole lives busy surviving. When you're exhausted, you follow what you already know, not necessarily what is better or more ethical. That isn't a personal failing. It's a reasonable response to having no spare energy.

Seen that way, centralization makes sense in a society that only has the energy, time and resources to follow, not to learn and love and grow. So this is less an argument for a new financial tool and more an argument about people healing from the structures that have harmed them. Enduring hardship for a long time isn't proof the hardship was ever necessary.

Harm is harm

So what actually changes a system like this? I don't think it's a new technology. It's people seeing clearly, and unprecedented times can open eyes on a much larger scale.

I'm transgender, and my community has been harmed. When the same structures start extending that harm to women, to men, to children, people begin to recognize it as the same thing. Harm is harm, whoever it lands on. That recognition can open eyes faster than any new technology could.

I want to be careful with this, though. Wider recognition builds solidarity, and that matters. But nobody's dignity should have to wait until the harm reaches enough other people to be taken seriously. Technology can't decide what a society is willing to accept. People do that.

Decentralized doesn't mean better

If centralization grows out of exhaustion, it's tempting to think the opposite must be the cure. Digital currency is often presented as better simply because it's decentralized. I don't think that follows.

Imagine several institutions that each independently process the funding for a patient's medical procedure. That sounds robust: no single point of control. But if every one of those institutions fails to give the patient access, it doesn't matter that the process was decentralized. It's the same failure, just through more steps.

Engineers have words for this. Component reliability, process reliability and outcome reliability are three different things. Every institution in that chain can do its own part "correctly" while the patient goes untreated. Each piece looks fine on its own, and the whole thing still fails. And when responsibility is spread across many hands, it gets easier for each one to point at the next.

A system built around the outcome looks different. It has:

  • A clear outcome. Everyone knows what success means for the person, not just for their own step.
  • Visible failure states. When something goes wrong, it shows, and someone is told.
  • End-to-end accountability. One place is answerable for the whole journey, not just a slice of it.
  • Appeals and recovery routes. A way back when a decision is wrong.
  • Monitoring of the outcome itself. Measuring whether people actually got what they needed, not only whether each step completed.

Decentralization is a property of an architecture. Access is an outcome. One doesn't guarantee the other. Neither centralization nor decentralization is the answer by itself. The outcome is.

What I keep coming back to

My work rests on one line: software should never fail a person in silence. The more I thought about digital currency, the more I saw that the line reaches well beyond software.

A ledger can be perfectly consistent. A process can be spread across many hands. A rule can be followed by every computer in the world. None of that tells you whether the person at the end got the care, the home or the chance they needed.

So why do we have so many systems that are correct and still fail people at so many stages? I don't think it's because we haven't found the right technology yet. Every system carries the values of the people who shaped it.

People's values become rules and policies. Policies become software. And software becomes the daily interaction every person has with the institutions they need: the bank, the clinic, the school, the benefits office.

The answer isn't a new system. It's a kinder, more loving world. When care is part of the values at the start, it travels all the way down into the code. That is what makes a strong economy, healthy societies and stability that lasts.

The real test isn't whether responsibility was shared out correctly. It's whether it was fulfilled.