The Money the Emperor Can’t Print
Power keeps collapsing toward a single point. The closer it gets, the more the winner needs a currency nobody owns, himself included.
On May 8, 2021, Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live. In one sketch he was asked what Dogecoin actually was, and after a few rounds of evasion he gave in: “It’s a hustle.” The audience laughed. Over the following days the coin fell by roughly a third.
Most people took the scene as the end of a joke. I’ve spent the past few years asking whether it was the start of one. This series is my answer, in two parts:
- The money the emperor can’t print: why power concentrates, and why that creates demand for a money no one controls (this piece)
- The last money: what AI does to the timeline, what machines will use to pay each other, what happens when the economy leaves Earth, and why the candidate I keep landing on is Dogecoin
Before I start: this is a thesis, not a price forecast and not financial advice. I’ll lay out the strongest case against my own argument at the end, because a thesis that can’t survive its critics isn’t worth publishing.
600,000 to 200
The anthropologist Robert Carneiro once estimated that around 1000 BC the world held something like 600,000 independent political units: villages, chiefdoms, bands. Today there are about 200 sovereign states.
You can argue with the exact figure. The direction is hard to argue with. Over the long run, human power has merged: tribes into kingdoms, kingdoms into empires, empires into nation-states, and in the last few decades nation-states into a world run partly by a handful of platforms.
Networks speed this up, because networks reward size. A messaging app is worth more when everyone you know is on it, so people join the one everyone is on, and it becomes worth more again. Search, social media and app stores have all followed this pattern. These markets don’t settle into a comfortable split. They tip, and one player ends up holding most of the value.
In the past, power moved at the speed of armies, then at the speed of capital. Now it moves at the speed of software, and AI is making software faster again. Part 2 covers that. For now, take the direction as given: power is converging, and it is converging faster.
The map with one empty cell
Whatever you think of Elon Musk, and people hold strong views, look at the shape of what he has assembled. Not the drama. The layers.
- Attention: X
- Intelligence: xAI / Grok
- Energy: Tesla
- Transport and connectivity: SpaceX / Starlink
- Payments: X Money, still being built
- Money itself: ?
No single person in history has held this many layers of the stack at once. Every row is a business on its own. Together they make up most of a civilization’s operating system.
One cell is still missing: the money itself. That means not the payment app, but the unit that moves through it.
The obvious move would be for the empire to issue its own. History says that is exactly the wrong move.
Every emperor who printed his own money
Kublai Khan ran one of the largest empires the world had seen, and he did something astonishing for the 13th century: he made paper money the empire’s standard currency. Marco Polo wrote about it with something close to disbelief. It worked for a while. Then the state did what states with printing presses tend to do. It printed to pay for wars and deficits. By the late Yuan dynasty the paper was close to worthless, and losing faith in the currency was part of losing faith in the dynasty.
Rome had no printing press, but it found the same trick. Over the third century, emperors steadily cut the silver in the denarius until the coin was mostly bronze with a thin coating. Each emperor gained in the short term. The empire as a whole lost the thing that made a coin a coin: people’s belief that it meant tomorrow what it meant today.
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Facebook tried a modern version in 2019. Libra was a global digital currency, run by a consortium, that would be available to billions of users at once. Regulators and central banks around the world pushed back almost immediately. Their objection wasn’t mainly technical. It was about power: one of the largest concentrations of attention in history wanted to issue money as well. The project was renamed, shrunk, and finally sold off in 2022.
The pattern is consistent. The more power the issuer has, the less the world trusts the money it issues. The reason is simple: the issuer could change the rules, and everyone knows it.
The paradox
This leads to what I think is the central paradox of the next few decades.
Picture an empire that controls attention, intelligence, energy and transport. Its users span every country and its machines span the planet, and soon the orbit around it. It needs a unit of account that hundreds of governments, billions of people and eventually countless AI agents will all accept.
Its own currency can’t fill that role, because nobody will accept a money its issuer can change at will. A national currency can fill it only on that nation’s terms. So the most concentrated network in history ends up needing the one thing it cannot own: a money that runs on fixed rules, belongs to no company, and can’t be printed even by the man at the top.
That is the cell I mean. The more power converges, the more valuable a currency outside that power becomes.
Why I keep landing on a joke
When I list what fits that cell, I end up looking at a coin that two software engineers made as a parody in December 2013, with a Shiba Inu on the logo.
I’ll make the full case in Part 2. Here is the outline:
- No issuer. There’s no company behind Dogecoin, no CEO, no treasury that can quietly change the supply. Both founders walked away years ago.
- Fixed, boring rules. About 5.2 billion new coins are issued each year, the same amount every year. As the total supply grows, that means the inflation rate falls a little each year. The design is meant for spending, not hoarding.
- It has survived. Dogecoin has been through repeated crashes of 80–90%, the founders leaving, and tens of thousands of copycat meme coins. It is still a household name more than a decade later.
- Musk loves it but doesn’t control it. He has promoted it for years, and in 2023 he even swapped the Twitter logo to the Doge for a few days. But he doesn’t issue it, he can’t change its rules, and he hasn’t built it into his companies’ finances.
That last point sounds like a weakness. Under this thesis it is the whole point. If Musk ever formally “married” Dogecoin and made it the house currency of his empire, it would become Libra with a dog on it. A coin can only fill the neutral-money cell if the most powerful player stays at arm’s length from it.
Where I could be wrong
I hold this view with conviction, and I also think it could fail. These are the strongest objections, stated as fairly as I can:
- Stablecoins may take the cell. Dollar-backed stablecoins already settle huge volumes, AI agent payment experiments mostly use them, and regulators are writing rules for them. “Neutral” may lose to “convenient and stable.”
- The empire may never adopt it. So far, X’s payment ambitions have started with plain dollars. Love expressed in tweets isn’t the same as a balance sheet.
- One-person risk. Dogecoin’s price has moved on one person’s posts for years. That’s a poor trait for a currency.
- Concentration. A large share of the supply sits in exchange custody wallets. Coins held on an exchange are only as ownerless as that exchange is honest. FTX taught that lesson the hard way.
- Survivorship bias. For every meme coin that lasts, thousands vanish. Pointing to the survivor proves less than it seems.
- Another neutral candidate. Bitcoin has the stronger claim as the neutral asset. It may simply take this role too.
I also keep a list of signals that would tell me I’m wrong. Musk’s companies settle on a different coin or their own stablecoin. Machine-to-machine payments lock in on stablecoins alone. Real on-chain usage only rises when the price spikes and fades otherwise. If those signals pile up and I don’t change my mind, that isn’t conviction. It’s stubbornness.
What comes next
Part 2 covers the variable that compresses every timeline here, AI, along with agents that can already pay for things, money beyond the planet, and the full case for why the dog.
I’m developing these ideas into a book. This series is the short version, written to be tested in public. Push back in the comments. The best objections will make the book better.
Not financial advice. I don’t know your finances, and nobody should put money they can’t afford to lose into a volatile asset because of an essay.
Read Part 2: The Last Money: Machines, Orbit, and the Joke That Refused to Die
Sungho Kim (Ochoigam)
