🌈 Rainbow Money, a Citizen's Guide

What if money came in colors?

Each color would have one job.

And each kind of money would answer the same three questions:

How does it enter circulation? How does it leave circulation? What can people verify?

📈 The colors can be traded for one another!

You can hold the colors you like. Shops accept the colors they like.

7 moneys is a lot, but people already separate money by purpose:

• A checking account for bills
• A retirement fund ya don't touch
• Gift cards in a drawer
• Travel miles
• Bits & Primogems

You already give money different jobs and treat each pile by its own rules. We're just making that official here... and if not, maybe learning about a color will let you pick a favorite!

Nobody wants to track 7 exchange rates while ordering 🍕 pizza: The price is shown in 🌈 rainbow.

🌈 Rainbow: the price tag

🌈 Rainbow is not money you keep.

It is the unit written on the price tag.

• ☕ Coffee: 3.20 🌈
• 🏠 Rent: 1,400 🌈 per month
• 🏗️ Salary: 50,000 🌈 per year

Real smart people (not me) figured out the 🌈 rainbow recipe.

You tap your phone and your wallet pays using whatever colors you have. The coffee shop receives whatever colors it prefers. The exchange happens underneath.

Lots of people already own a rainbow, by the way. Pension statements offer one number sitting on top of stocks, bonds and cash you never think about. Same trick!

🗺️ IRL → The SDR is also valued from a basket whose exchange rates move underneath. It isn’t grocery money, though, and the IMF can rewrite its recipe every five years.

Who controls the 🌈 rainbow's value?

A little bit the 🏛️ government, a little bit the market.

🌈 Rainbow is where the exchange rates come from: millions of routine conversions every day. There's not one guy with an omega 🧠 picking "🟨 1 yellow = 1.74 🟥 red", the market sets them through supply and demand.

The 🏛️ government has levers that can change the value of some colors. In response, both you and the market can choose favorite colors, so you're not necessarily stuck with what 🏛️ they choose.

Why do 🟪 purple, 🌸 pink and 🟧 orange stay out of the recipe?

Because every lease, salary and pension in the country is written in 🌈 rainbow!

Add a struggling town's money or a wartime currency to the recipe, and every contract silently changes value when the town stumbles or the war goes badly.

🌈 Rainbow tries to stay boring, so it can't quite have all the colors!

Wait wait wait I heard about this before!

From what I understood, Hayek is arguing for a Hunger Games of private moneys. 🌈 Rainbow differs in two ways:

1. Idk if the 🏛️ government works for everyone, but I trust 💸 private interests not to.
2. No one money wins / disappears, they compete but coexist.

🟥 Red: the money that moves

Red is spending money.

A pile of red slowly 🌋 melts while you hold it.

Meanwhile, the 🏛️ treasury pays fresh red into the economy through ordinary public spending: wages, pensions, procurement.

Red is a tide: new red flows in → old red evaporates.

The 🌋 melt rate is a small published % per year, turned 🔼 in slumps and 🔽 in booms. The 🏛️ treasury replaces the melt, but doesn't pocket it directly.

Paper notes have a little colored sticker on it that show if they're valid as long as you (or the till's scanner) know the sticker. Red money is printed in batches. When a note reaches a bank, it settles for face value minus the melt since that date.

Red in your checking account is more dramatic, it's just cut out! Banks don't collect it, they have a mandate to apply reverse interest continually.

Isn't the 🌋 melt a tax?

In economic terms, it does behave like a tax on having red. The amount of red that melts gives the 🏛️ government permission to issue new red which they do pick what to do with.

🗺️ IRL → Your money ✂️ cutting is exactly like inflation, there's just no way to tell what proportion of it is the tax vs other reasons!

So the difference with our red is you see the 🌋 melt. Red publishes the rate, the amount melted and the amount replaced.

Why would I accept a 🌋 melting paycheck?

Your wage is set by value on the day it lands. If your paycheck is valued at 200 🍔 hamburgers, you may be paid 100🍔 worth of 🟥 + 100🍔 worth of 🟦.

Two weeks of melt rounds to pennies. Twenty years of melt though, not so good!

It's the point! Red is for spending! We'll talk about 🟨 yellow later to save!

🟦 Blue: the money with a steering wheel

Blue is the familiar one.

The 🏦 Central Bank manages it. People with massive 🧠 look at employment, prices, credit, recessions and strange things nobody predicted, then make a judgment and publish how much they create, buyback, or build paper airplanes with.

There is no eternal formula.

That is blue's feature. Every rigid rule eventually meets a situation its authors never imagined, and blue is the color allowed to bend.

Man, why not only use blue? Works right now!

🗺️ IRL → Today, one (🧠) committee's judgment governs 100% of your money, and its mistakes reach you as inflation you can't escape.

Blue governs a quarter of the 🌈 mix. Its performance is a live public price. Anyone can hold less blue without leaving the economy. Print too much blue and it visibly cheapens against the colors that can't be printed, within hours, on every phone.

What's the difference between red and blue? Both lose value...

• 🟦 Blue = decision + inflation (if decided)
• 🟥 Red = mechanism + it literally goes poof.

🟥 Red is more legible, the mechanism tells you why you no longer can buy a 🚲 bicycle. 🟦 Blue hides it in the price tags, 🟥 red shows it on the wallet.

Contrast that with the 🟦:🟥 exchange rate and you gain visibility on the 🟦 decision too.

🟩 Green: one person, one share

Green is a census with a mint attached.

1 living member = 1 🟩 green share.

41m 🇨🇦 members = 41m 🟩

The arithmetic is easy. The word member sneaks in a stupid amount of politics, or an amount of stupid politics. That's not money's job.

How does it enter?

When a child is uh... minted, one share is also minted alongside into a 🗝️ locked trust. Hands off until adulthood: it can't be sold, pledged as collateral or traded.

A person who earns citizenship receives a share too, and rules could have 🗝️ trust, options, or whatever.

Does the money delete on death?

One share's worth, yes.

The estate returns 1🟩. If they have none, they buy it.

Isn't this welfare with paint on it?

A little bit?

The inverse, it landing in the 🏛️ treasury, is a lot more toxic, because then centralized powers gain the interest in population management.

Keep in mind every member will also owe green taxes throughout their life.

Your very first tax refund!

If the 🏛️ government wants to help one child more because they need more, great! That top-up is ordinary public spending. Need can change the budget; it cannot change what one person means to the 🟩 green supply.

Are we financializing human value?

Yeah, this is a weird color. It exists as contrast, a morcel that isn't tied to how money moves, but instead to something real which happens to touch so much of our world.

🗺️ IRL → Today, an insurance firm already guesses that number and the actuarial data is proprietary. Likewise, your future pension already bets on how many people will be around later.

The difference here isn't that the pricing is new, we already model and project this number further than any generation before us. It's that green publishes one number instead, and it's the same for everyone. A newborn mints an identical share regardless of their parents.

🟨 Yellow: the money that waits

🟨 Yellow is for saving.

A fixed number of yellow units is created at the beginning.

After that: no more!

Not during a recession. Not because an election is coming. Not because somebody found a very good project.

But... money gets lost. Socks in the washer?

On a ledger, LOST = DORMANT -> nobody touched this account in a very, very long time.

After 50 years, ordinary unclaimed-property rules may return that abandoned balance to circulation.

The cap still holds because nothing new is created.

Isn't day one the greatest gold rush in history?

Only if there's a gun to fire. So... dont.

No auction, no fire sale. The whole stock sits in the treasury and seeps out 30 years through ordinary government paychecks.

That makes the opening distribution paycheck-shaped instead of whale-shaped. Rich people can still buy 🟨 yellow afterward, but now they have to buy it from millions of holders.

Who enforces "no more"?

Definitely not goodwill.

The cap is constitutional and the complete ledger is public. 🏛️ Governments can still break constitutions... 🟨 yellow can't physically stop them. It can SCREAM, though. If you think about it, most constitutions are backed by total screaming volume.

Mint one unit above the cap and everybody can see it. 🟨 Yellow falls against the other colors, savers stampede out and the 🏛️ government destroys its own saving promise for a one-time sugar hit.

If "rare spreadsheet number" sounds fake: why is a casino chip worth a hundred dollars? Because the cage takes it back. The tax office takes 🟨 yellow back, forever.

Who spends yellow?

You spend 🟨 yellow at the same moments you'd sell an investment today: the down payment, the tuition, retirement. Spending it at 65yo is harvesting what you stored at forty.

Shops and payrolls mostly run on 🟥 red and 🟦 blue, so a yellow hoard doesn't remove the money needed for lunch. Taxes also pull some 🟨 yellow back into circulation every year.

Scrooge McDuck can still make 🟨 yellow painfully expensive. He just can't drain the only money everybody needs to buy groceries.

🟪 Purple: the money of here

Every town may have its own 🟪 purple.

🟪Montréal. 🟪Laval. 🟪Sherbrooke. 3 separate moneys with 3 separate prices.

It is City Hall with a ticker symbol.

A municipality may issue some against the taxes it expects to collect, up to a legal fraction of its tax base. The town always takes its own 🟪 purple at full face value for property tax, water, transit, permits.

The national 🏛️ government doesn't accept purple from people and promises nothing to the town. The 🏛️ government may rescue a town's people, but it can't turn the town's 🟪 purple into national money at par.

Why would I want this?

Two reasons:

1. It structurally motivates local spending. People/shops you can meet and talk with.
2. If you know the Mayor is on crack, you can do something about it.

Hold some out of hometown loyalty. Hold none out of hometown skepticism.

You can, in effect, short your mayor.

What happens when real people are struggling?

When a town truly fails, 🟪 purple holders lose money. Every unit still works as a local tax coupon while the town exists, but its market value can fall. The loss is real.

Keep the buses moving. Support residents in national colors. Replace the administration if needed. The 🏛️ government doesn't buy every 🟪 purple holder out at full price.

That would reward whoever bought cheap 🟪 purple while betting on a bailout. It would also tell every town that it is secretly allowed to print basically national money.

The losses should land on volunteers, so paychecks may contain only a modest share of 🟪 purple. Pensions get 0%. City Hall does not fix its balance sheet by stapling it to workers who can't easily leave.

🗺️ IRL → Municipal rot can hide for fifteen years, then detonate in bankruptcy or restructuring when it is too late to fix anything. 🟪 Purple hurts earlier, smaller and in time to matter.

🌸 Pink: the money for one bad day

Most years, 🌸 pink doesn't exist.

Then something large and awful happens. A war. A hurricane. A pandemic with incredible timing.

A supermajority may break the glass and create one named vintage:

----- Pink 2038

• A cute name
• Tied to an event
• Max issue size
• Repayment plan
• Maturity Date

Most importantly, it gets one promise:

on that date, one Pink 2038 becomes one 🌈 rainbow.

The 🏛️ government spends 🌸 pink directly into the emergency through approved contracts and service bonuses. Normal salaries and procurement stay in the normal colors.

Pink never enters the 🌈 rainbow recipe. A flood should not quietly rewrite every lease in the country.

The 🏛️ government will just extend the emergency forever.

Moving the date means publicly defaulting on contractors, soldiers and citizens who can point at the paper. (And yes, there are constitutional rules for the maximum length of an issue, cause a 200y emergency is some 🤡 clown shit.)

The repayment plan is about how the government assembles the 🌈 rainbow required ahead of time so there's no price shock on maturity.

Creditors give the deadline an organized constituency with a financial reason to enforce it.

Won't the price be terrifying?

Sometimes, yeah. 🌸 Pink's price is a live opinion on whether the country will keep this one promise.

The alternative was never ignorance. It was insiders knowing and you not.

🗺️ IRL → COVID19 caused massive deficit across the world. The price of things naturally jumped as production and logistics problems arose, then never came back down. We can now only argue about how much of today's higher price level is the bill for COVID.

And because 🌸 pink stays outside 🌈 rainbow, the emergency doesn't automatically become part of the ruler measuring bread, pensions and rent.

🟧 Orange: the money that keeps quiet

🟧 Orange is physical cash.

Coins. Paper. That is all.

No orange account. No orange credit card. No institutional orange loan creating a second claim on the same note.

If I give you ten 🟧 orange, now you have ten 🟧 orange and I don't.

Nobody records where it goes. That's not an oversight. That's the job.

Every other color in this system leaves a trail. 🟧 Orange keeps one little part of life deliberately unwatched: the awkward donation, the counselor your insurer shouldn't hear about, the escape fund from a bad household.

The private space is fenced: at most 3% of the money stock, no note larger than 50🌈, and a scheduled note replacement every twenty years.

How do I even get it?

Not through payroll or an ATM. An ATM is a hole in the wall of an account.

Banks and post offices may exchange 🟧 orange at the counter. They just can't hold it for you.

Three doors:

1. The window. Every adult gets a small monthly right to swap other colors for 🟧 orange. Unused months stack up, so you don't have to visit a post office twelve times a year. The window knows roughly how much you withdrew. It does not know what happened next.

2. A store's till. Change and cash-back.

3. Hand to hand. The babysitter, the market stall, your half of the bill.

Lose it and it's gone. If your mattress burns, the bank does not eat the loss, because there was never an account at the bank.

Once a generation, old notes swap for new at full value on a calendar published decades ahead. Notes that never come back are finally declared lost and replaced inside the supply cap.

If I put a "we accept orange" sign at my bar, what does that say?

Nothing, because no sign is needed.

Every household and shop owes a tiny sliver of tax in 🟧 orange. A household that can't reach a window may surrender unused entitlement to cover its sliver instead of buying cash at a premium.

Because every shop owes some, every shop has a boring reason to accept it: the till fills the tax envelope for free.

Customers can get 🟧 orange. The shop wants 🟧 orange. The tax office takes 🟧 orange.

Your bar accepting it says exactly one thing: you sell drinks.

The privacy tradeoff

🟧 Orange cannot tell the political dissident from the drug dealer.

That sucks. It is also honest.

That judgment belongs to people, laws and courts, not monetary policy. Cash does not approve of everything bought with it. It preserves a small space where payment alone creates no permanent record.

The compromise is the cap. 🟧 Orange blocks the free, automatic logging of every payment, but it doesn't defeat a warrant. Police may investigate a person, and a business's visible activity still has to match its books.

It protects customers, not invisible merchants. Think of a doctor: perfectly visible person, confidential for her patients.

🟤 Brown & Clear: the money you won't see

Every color so far is money you can hold.

This section is about the money you can't, because the system refuses to create it.

Banks move millions of payments between eachother. Giving that plumbing its own money would be extremely convenient: one deep institutional currency flowing through pipes where ordinary people never look.

Let's call it an affectionate name: 🟤 brown.

There is no authorized brown.

Every recipe for it spoils:

• Make brown from the 🌈 rainbow basket, and the pipes hoard scarce 🟨 yellow.
• Make it from 🟦 blue, and hi, it's 🟦 Blue 2.
• Create it as needed, and it becomes an eighth currency with the loosest rules, held only by insiders.

🗺️ IRL → A bank deposit does not mean your money is sitting under the counter with your name on it. It is a privately created claim on money.

The moment banks start settling those claims with an easier number they invented (they really like to), that number becomes 🟤 brown regardless of the cute name on the spreadsheet.

So the pipes get something else: Clear.

If Emma owes Leo 5 and Leo owes Emma 2, they don't pass seven coins back and forth. They cross out what cancels. Emma gives Leo 3.

Banks do the same. Clear appears when payments create debts between banks. During the day, opposite debts cancel. Only the remainder settles in actual 🟥🟦🟩🟨.

Clear is the scorekeeping in between. It is written in 🌈 rainbow, but you cannot hold it, save it or spend it. We call it Clear because you can see straight through it.

Every evening, Clear goes to zero.

Not small. Not reasonable. Zero. Nada. Rien. Still zero.

A scoreboard still lit after the game isn't a scoreboard anymore. It's a debt for the next game. And a debt living in the pipes night after night is 🟤 brown.

The closing number is published. Anyone can check it. (yes, it's still zero)

Zero means the pipes are only pipes. Anything else means someone minted 🟤 brown.

One wallet

You do not stand in the grocery aisle doing monetary homework:

I wonder about today's 🟦 blue-🟩 green exchange rate.

You see:

42.80 🌈

Tap. You pay.

Behind the number, your wallet may spend 🟥 red first. Your retirement settings may slowly collect 🟨 yellow. You may keep some 🟪 purple because you like City Hall, or none because you don't. You may carry 40 🟧 orange in your pocket.

And hopefully there is no 🌸 pink at all.

Rainbow Money does not delete inflation, town bankruptcies, war bills, dilution or surveillance from the universe. It gives each risk a different pipe, makes some pipes smaller and puts gauges on the rest.

You still get one price tag.

🟥 Red moves.

🟦 Blue bends.

🟩 Green counts us.

🟨 Yellow waits.

🟪 Purple belongs somewhere.

🌸 Pink remembers the emergency.

🟧 Orange doesn't look.

🟤 Brown never exists.

🌈 Rainbow measures.

Rainbow Money, a 🏛️ Government's Guide, covers constitutional rules and adjustable settings to support colorful money.

Motivation: I'm watching friends decide house purchases based on interest rates advertised as news since covid. Today's sewi rate means telo in 2026, soweli in 2012, tomo in 2007 and esun in 1989. Friends make life-altering decisions from counsel whose frame is orthogonal, or just missing.