🖨️ How the Money Printer Works

Not a literal printer

New money today is mostly created with keystrokes:

• Central banks buy assets with money created from nothing
• Commercial banks create deposits when they issue loans

In 2020 alone, roughly 1 in 5 dollars ever created came into existence. Nobody stole your savings — they just made everyone’s slice of the pie thinner.

Quick check: When trillions of new dollars are created, what happens to the dollars you already saved?

1. Nothing — yours are separate
2. Each one becomes a smaller share of all money, buying less over time ✓
3. They earn more interest automatically

Dilution. Like a company issuing millions of new shares — existing shareholders own less of the company. Existing dollar-holders own less of the economy.

The Cantillon effect

Here’s the unfair part: new money isn’t airdropped equally. It enters at the top — banks, governments, large corporations — and trickles down.

Those closest to the spigot spend the new money at old prices. By the time it reaches wages, prices have already risen.

Named after Richard Cantillon, who spotted this in the 1700s. The game is old; only the printer is new.

Quick check: Under the Cantillon effect, who benefits most from new money creation?

1. Wage earners and cash savers
2. Those who receive the new money first ✓
3. Everyone equally

First receivers spend at yesterday’s prices; last receivers pay tomorrow’s. It’s a quiet transfer from savers to the well-connected — no vote required.

The exit question

So: money with no supply limit, distributed unfairly, taxing savers silently.

For decades the escape hatches were property, stocks, gold — imperfect, and hard for regular people to access.

Then in 2009, an anonymous programmer released something new: money with a fixed supply, open to anyone with a phone.

Time to meet Bitcoin. 🟠