🌈 Rainbow Money, a Government's Guide

The Citizen's Guide describes the wallet. This guide describes the rulebook behind it.

A citizen needs one number at the grocery store. A government needs less charming answers:

• Who may create each color?
• What removes it from circulation?
• Which rules may change, and who may change them?
• What happens when a town, a bank or the national government breaks a promise?

This maps the questions legislation would have to settle. It does not supply statutory language.

The promises

The system begins with six promises.

1. Prices, wages and long contracts may be written in 🌈 rainbow, a common unit made from the four national colors.
2. The colors trade freely. Public institutions report what they issue, retire and receive, but do not set the exchange rates.
3. National compulsory payments create steady demand for 🟥 red, 🟦 blue, 🟩 green, 🟨 yellow and a small amount of 🟧 orange.
4. Every ordinary national-government payment contains equal shares of 🟥 red, 🟦 blue, 🟩 green and 🟨 yellow in that payment.
5. 🟪 Purple belongs to its municipality. A senior government may rescue residents of a failed town, but not the face value of its 🟪 purple.
6. Every color has a named issuer, a rule for entering circulation, a rule for leaving it and a public fact against which the rule can be checked.

Some answers are "nothing." 🟨 Yellow has no destruction rule, and 🟦 blue has no automatic one. A blank is acceptable when it is deliberate.

Here is the whole rulebook at a glance:

• 🟥 Red
  • Issued by: Treasury, replacing melted units through spending
  • Leaves through: Continuous melt
  • Demanded by: National basket and everyday spending
  • Checked through: Issuance, supply estimate and melt rate
• 🟦 Blue
  • Issued by: Central bank
  • Leaves through: No automatic rule
  • Demanded by: National basket and monetary flexibility
  • Checked through: Operations, supply and exchange rate
• 🟩 Green
  • Issued by: Membership authority, into personal trusts
  • Leaves through: Estate settlement
  • Demanded by: National basket and estate returns
  • Checked through: Eligible population, minting and returns
• 🟨 Yellow
  • Issued by: Founding mint, once
  • Leaves through: Nothing
  • Demanded by: National basket and saving
  • Checked through: Complete base ledger
• 🟪 Purple
  • Issued by: Municipality
  • Leaves through: Dissolution settlement
  • Demanded by: That municipality's taxes and fees
  • Checked through: Issuance, revenue base and exchange rate
• 🌸 Pink
  • Issued by: Treasury after a supermajority vote
  • Leaves through: Redemption at maturity
  • Demanded by: Its promised 🌈 rainbow payment
  • Checked through: Size, date, price and other live vintages
• 🟧 Orange
  • Issued by: Treasury, as physical cash
  • Leaves through: Loss and scheduled series retirement
  • Demanded by: Small tax share and ordinary cash use
  • Checked through: Mint and rotation totals; estimates between rotations
• Clear (not a color)
  • Issued by: No one — a payment creates it as an intraday obligation
  • Leaves through: Netting and end-of-day settlement in actual colors
  • Demanded by: Nothing — it cannot be held
  • Checked through: The published closing balance, which is zero

Clear is not a currency. It records rainbow-valued obligations during a clearing cycle and follows the same public accounting as the colors. The reason for excluding 🟤 brown appears with the institutions below.

Taxes create recurring demand. They do not guarantee a price, deep markets or competent government.

Four kinds of control

The constitutional question comes before the number:

Will the state most want to move this rule at the same moment moving it would do the most harm?

If the answer is yes, the rule is not a ⚙️ Setting. Wartime governments want larger emergency-money allowances; failing towns want to pay more wages in town money. The limits exist for those moments.

The rules belong to four governance classes:

Nothing the state would grab for in a panic should be classified as a ⚙️ Setting.

The values below are placeholders. Ratios are used instead of dollar amounts so the rules describe the system rather than one country's present-day economy.

🔒 Locked: the definition of the system

Locked rules should be memorable and tolerable when policy fashions change.

The rainbow's equal shares are a founding calculation, not a continuing target. They determine how much of each color goes into one rainbow. Those four amounts then remain fixed. As market prices move, each color's share of the rainbow's current value may rise or fall. Rebalancing would change the unit being used to measure those prices.

The words per payment matter. If only the annual total had to balance, the state could pay doctors in appreciating 🟨 yellow and nurses in melting 🟥 red while both salary tables showed the same 🌈 rainbow amount. Equal composition makes differences in public pay visible as differences in total pay, where they can be debated.

The tax basket is fixed for a related reason. Raising 🟨 yellow's share would manufacture extra demand for 🟨 yellow. A complicated formula would not remove that discretion; it would bury the founding choices inside coefficients few people could contest. The recipe and the basket are intentionally plain.

🏛️ Amendable: dangerous freedoms with a slow release

These rules may need to change over generations, but never at the speed of the crisis that creates pressure to change them.

An amendment can change one of these rules for the future. The delay prevents officials from changing it to escape the event it was meant to govern.

📐 Bounded: a public choice inside a hard edge

Emergencies differ, so the legislature needs limited discretion inside a fixed range.

A flood and a long war may require different maturities. A 200-year maturity would make temporary issuance permanent. The range is fixed; the chosen date is published with the vote.

⚙️ Setting: ordinary tuning

These values are meant to move. Their mandate, operator and publication schedule must still be written down.

These examples are concrete so the design can be argued with. They are not findings. Six percent is easier to criticize than “a modest melt,” which is exactly why a placeholder is useful.

The 🟩 green adequacy target is not a currency ⚙️ Setting. It is an ordinary budget choice: provisionally, bring the trust to about one year of median income at age 18, with a public top-up schedule for new citizens. The appropriation may change without changing the number of green shares.

Decisions that move together

Some apparent knobs are one decision seen from several sides.

• The founding balance: 🟨 yellow's founding stock, the population-defined 🟩 green count, the opening 🟥 red and 🟦 blue supplies and the national basket weights jointly shape the opening scale and demand of the four national colors. A launch plan must debate them together. Green's adequacy top-up is ordinary spending, not part of this supply decision.
• The war brake: 🌸 pink's voting threshold, per-vintage cap, maturity range, total live exposure and repayment capacity all limit the same promise. Weakening one weakens the package.

Other parameters can be debated more independently: the 🟥 red melt rate, 🟦 blue target, 🟧 orange note size, 🟧 orange rotation schedule and 🟪 purple dissolution formula do not automatically resize another color.

Money in, money out

The treasury needs one rule for compulsory inflows and another for public outflows.

Compulsory inflows use the basket

Any compulsory transfer to the national government for its own account uses the fixed basket, whatever the statute calls it. Taxes, tariffs, fines, tolls and mandatory licence fees cannot escape the rule through a change of label.

The obligation is calculated for each payer. Electronic withholding can assemble 🟥 red, 🟦 blue, 🟩 green and 🟨 yellow gradually. 🟧 Orange can be credited through small physical deposits during the year, then returned to circulation through public exchange windows. A person who forgoes unused window entitlement may surrender it as a non-transferable credit against their own 🟧 orange share.

Foreign payers don't need to find five local colors. A tariff may be quoted and paid in 🌈 rainbow value; assembling the domestic basket then becomes a treasury bookkeeping obligation.

Asset sales are different. An auction, royalty or privatization is an exchange for something the state owns, not a compulsory payment. The treasury may receive whichever color clears the sale. The outflow rule applies when it spends the proceeds.

Public outflows use equal quarters

Every ordinary national payment uses equal 🌈 rainbow-value quarters of 🟥 red, 🟦 blue, 🟩 green and 🟨 yellow. That applies to a single salary, pension, procurement invoice or transfer—not merely to the budget in aggregate.

Per-payment composition supplies routine demand for every national color, prevents favored groups from receiving a better mix and makes deficit finance visible.

Dodging recursion: Market exchanges made only to assemble the required colors are not ordinary public payments. If the treasury trades 🟦 blue for 🟨 yellow to prepare a salary, that exchange does not itself use equal quarters. The salary does.

The government may still tax, borrow and issue bonds. The central bank alone may create or contract 🟦 blue under its own rules. The treasury may receive existing 🟦 blue through taxes, borrowing or exchange; it may receive newly created 🟦 blue only through operations those rules authorize. The treasury itself cannot issue 🟦 blue. It also cannot create 🟥 red beyond the melt-replacement mandate, create 🟩 green without a new member or create 🟨 yellow at all. If spending exceeds receipts, it must acquire the missing colors on the market. Using newly created 🟦 blue to buy them puts the pressure into 🟦 blue's exchange rate.

Deficits remain possible. They acquire a visible price.

The 🟨 yellow vault is supposed to empty

The founding 🟨 yellow stock is paid out gradually through ordinary public payments. The release schedule distributes 🟨 yellow; it is not a permanent source of government revenue.

After the vault empties, the treasury obtains 🟨 yellow through taxes, purchases or borrowing, like anyone else. Reopening the mint would create a new currency promise, not repair the old one.

Most familiar seigniorage disappears or becomes explicit. 🟨 Yellow cannot be reissued. 🟩 Green goes to members under its population rule. 🟥 Red's melt funds an equal amount of replacement issuance, with both totals published. 🟦 Blue remains the flexible issuance channel, and its exchange rate makes heavy use visible.

The institutions behind the colors

🟥 Red and 🟦 blue: two kinds of flexibility

Once the rate is set, 🟥 red's rule is mechanical: a published fraction of existing 🟥 red disappears continuously, and the treasury replaces those units through the 🟥 red quarter of ordinary spending. The central bank chooses the rate inside the 🏛️ Amendable band; the treasury cannot choose the rate or widen the band.

The melt functions as a holding fee on 🟥 red, and its yield funds the 🟥 red quarter of public spending. Unlike an inflation tax, the rate, the amount removed and the replacement issuance are published separately. Replacement remains limited to what disappeared.

Electronic 🟥 red is ledger arithmetic. A paper 🟥 red note carries an issue date, circulates at face value, then settles at a bank for face value minus its accumulated melt. That keeps checkout simple, though note age, damage and the habit of passing the oldest notes first would need field testing.

🟦 Blue is managed by a central bank because some shocks defeat rules written in advance. Its statute must specify who may issue or contract 🟦 blue, what assets the bank may buy, what price measure its target refers to and what it must publish. “No automatic retirement” does not mean contraction is forbidden.

The treasury and central bank remain separate actors. A falling 🟦 blue rate reveals pressure; it does not, by itself, prove whether the policy causing it was wise.

🟩 Green: membership has to be a legal fact

“Population” is too vague for a minting law. 🟩 Green needs a member registry and exact rules for births abroad, citizenship, relinquishment, missing persons and the founding allocation for people already alive.

Each qualifying member creates exactly one 🟩 green share, and the mint deposits the entire share into the member's trust. The treasury receives none of it. A child's trust unlocks at adulthood. Citizenship, not arrival at the border, triggers the rule for a new citizen.

The share has no administrative target price. If the policy target is a trust worth about one year of median income at age 18, any shortfall is funded as ordinary government spending in equal quarters of 🟥 red, 🟦 blue, 🟩 green and 🟨 yellow. The trust may hold rainbow-valued assets, but no extra green is minted. Immigration policy may phase a new citizen's top-up over time; it may not redirect any part of the green share to the treasury.

A weak green price remains visible. Any top-up appears separately as a budget line and cannot dilute existing holdings.

After a member dies, the estate returns one share, buying it on the market if necessary. Settlement will lag the census, so the public report should show both eligible members and unsettled estates. Smoothing the process also prevents a disaster from causing an immediate monetary contraction.

Insolvent estates remain an open design question. Writing the share off breaks the supply rule; charging heirs creates personal debt; public insurance spreads the loss. The statute must say who absorbs the loss and how it appears in the supply count.

🟩 Green can look like the odd color out... no market or mandate sets its supply, only a fact the state cannot manufacture. That is the point. The membership authority operates the mint, but a member's existence pulls the trigger, and the identical share is the only monetary promise the system extends to everyone on equal terms.

The price must be read for what it is: tax demand against a population-sized supply. It moves with demographics and estate flows, not with anyone's worth. The number is information while the equality of the shares is a commitment.

🟨 Yellow: a fixed supply needs fixed claims

All 🟨 yellow is created at the founding and recorded on a public base ledger. Dormant accounts may return to the treasury through ordinary unclaimed-property rules, but the units are recycled, not recreated.

Ownership concentration is still a risk. Commerce can route around a squeeze by using other colors, but tax demand means a large holder could make 🟨 yellow expensive to acquire.

🟨 Yellow again: inside the recipe or beside it?

The recipe fixes amounts, not shares. Three national colors can be issued; 🟨 yellow cannot, so its price tends to rise against theirs. As 🟨 yellow landgrabs the 🌈 rainbow's value share, discretionary monetary policy loses power, which makes the 🌈 system less capable of reacting to problems. Rebalancing isn't a repair because changing the amounts changes the measuring stick.

The structural alternative removes 🟨 yellow from the recipe alone. The basket and equal payments still carry it, so tax demand, the vault release and the base ledger survive, and savers keep their countable asset.

🟨 Yellow is also the system's offer to "the world": a store of value no issuer can dilute. That power does not depend on the recipe. The recipe decides where foreign saving lands. Inside it, a wave of foreign demand for 🟨 yellow moves every domestic price written in 🌈 rainbow. Beside it, the same wave rewards holders and deepens the market without touching the unit.

Whether 🟨 yellow belongs inside the unit or beside it remains an open design question.

🟪 Purple: rescue people, not the paper

A municipality may issue 🟪 purple only inside the cap set by the level of government that creates municipalities. Local obligations remain denominated in 🌈 rainbow. When paid to its issuer, one 🟪 purple counts for its stated 🌈 face value even if its market price is lower. The national government does not accept it at face value.

The same outside authority sets the wage and pension limits. Otherwise a town in trouble could raise its own issuance ceiling and make its least mobile workers absorb more 🟪 purple.

If a town fails, a province may keep services running, support residents and replace the administration using national colors. It does not redeem 🟪 purple at par. On dissolution, 🟪 purple converts into a tax credit against the successor jurisdiction using the formula fixed before the failure: the trailing 12-month average market price ending before the formal dissolution process began.

🟪 Purple's exchange rate is an alarm, not a perfect report card. Thin municipal markets are easy to manipulate, so the price must appear beside issuance, tax revenue, trading volume, large positions and audited accounts.

🌸 Pink: every emergency gets its own promise

🌸 Pink exists in dated vintages. A legislature authorizes 🌸 Pink 2038 with an exact maximum size, maturity, permitted uses and redemption source. 🌸 Pink 2040 requires another two-thirds vote.

Each vintage stays separate. Consolidating issues or extending them quietly would hide how many promises remain outstanding. The authorization record should list every live 🌸 pink, its size, price, maturity and expected repayment source.

Several 🌸 pinks automatically price one another because they compete for the same future redemption capacity. Five vintages near par say something different from five trading at 60 cents. The response to a larger emergency is another visible vote for another capped vintage, not an administrative increase to the cap.

🌸 Pink remains outside both the 🌈 rainbow recipe and the ordinary tax basket. Its demand comes from the dated promise that one unit will redeem for one 🌈 rainbow. Keeping it outside the price unit prevents a changing view of the emergency from automatically changing every salary, lease and grocery price.

The market signal has a cost. A falling 🌸 pink price may coordinate panic and give adversaries useful information. Publishing the price accepts that risk.

🟧 Orange: privacy with a boundary

🟧 Orange is physical bearer cash. Banks and post offices may exchange it at a counter, but they may not accept 🟧 orange deposits, make institutional 🟧 orange loans or issue account claims called 🟧 orange. Every unit is the object itself.

It is also more tightly bounded than ordinary cash: no more than 3% of the money stock, no note larger than 50 🌈, no accounts or institutional balances, and a scheduled series retirement every 20 years. The innovation is a written ceiling and amendment procedure for unmonitored payment.

Every adult accrues a small monthly right to exchange other colors for 🟧 orange, banked up to several years. The window retains the unused entitlement and whether it was exercised that year, but not individual exchange dates or later transactions. Changes in the entitlement balance can reveal an approximate amount withdrawn. They cannot reveal where the cash went afterward. Someone who cannot reach a window may surrender unused entitlement to discharge their 🟧 orange tax share instead; the same entitlement cannot be both banked and used as a credit.

Shops supply change and cash-back. The tiny tax share gives businesses an ordinary reason to handle 🟧 orange, so accepting it does not become a suspicious opt-in. The access rate and ceiling must be calibrated so they can be honored inside the 3% stock cap; accrued entitlement never authorizes extra issuance.

The treasury knows what it printed but cannot continuously count notes lost in fires, washing machines or walls. On the constitutional schedule, an old series is exchanged at full value over a long window. Returned notes are retired; the rest are declared lost; replacements may be printed only up to the cap.

🟧 Orange prevents an automatic payment history. It does not defeat a warrant. Businesses still keep books, and investigators may still investigate a suspected crime. Investigators must begin with a suspected act or person rather than a complete payment history.

Clear: settlement without a settlement currency

Institutions must clear millions of payments a day. A wholesale currency behind the public colors would provide one deep settlement market. Each proposed backing causes a problem: a rainbow-backed 🟤 brown locks scarce 🟨 yellow in the clearing system; a blue-backed 🟤 brown duplicates 🟦 blue; an elastic 🟤 brown becomes an eighth monetary promise held only by institutions.

Most gross flows cancel. Reciprocal obligations net within each clearing cycle, and only the residual settles in actual colors. Clear records those obligations until netting. This sharply reduces settlement demand, including the amount of 🟨 yellow institutions must hold.

Intraday credit is capped and collateralized by 🌈 rainbow value; the collateral may use any color mix. Requiring margin in one color would make that color a mandatory reserve asset.

The 🔒 Locked rule is simple: no balance survives the close. The closing balance is published daily. If it is not zero, the surviving balance is 🟤 brown, created without a vote.

Banks can recreate what the mint forbids

The constitution can limit base money while private banks create deposit claims on top of it.

If a bank accepts one 🟨 yellow, lends most of it and lets both depositor and borrower spend claims labelled “🟨 yellow,” the fixed supply is already fiction. The banking chapter therefore has to say:

• which colors permit deposit creation;
• which require full custody backing;
• whether a bank claim must be labelled and priced separately from the base color;
• what protection was priced in advance, what value each claim receives in resolution and what a lender of last resort may deliver;
• how banks settle one 🌈 rainbow payment across several ledgers;
• how the rules reach money-market funds, stablecoins and foreign banks offering equivalent claims.

🟧 Orange answers by banning accounts. 🟨 Yellow probably demands full reserve banking. 🟥 Red and 🟦 blue are the natural home for elastic credit. Whether 🟩 green may be lent at all remains unsettled.

Until this is resolved, private claims can recreate an eighth currency on top of the seven public colors.

Private 🟤 brown

Banning public 🟤 brown is not enough. The rule must follow function rather than name. A transferable claim held between financial institutions, used to settle at or near par and carried past the close is presumptively 🟤 brown. Correspondent balances, pooled custody claims sold as a base color and offshore 🌈 rainbow deposits all present that risk. The eurodollar market is the precedent for wholesale money created without a domestic mint.

No contract term cleanly separates such a balance from term debt. Regulators must consider transferability, redemption terms, price stability, demandability and repeated rollovers. An overnight loan rolled hundreds of times may function as a persistent balance. A claim trading just below par may still function as money until a run breaks that assumption.

The statute therefore uses rebuttable presumptions:

• Transferability, near-par stability and demandability indicate a money-like claim, with the burden on the institution manufacturing the ambiguity.
• A repeatedly rolled position is presumed a balance, not a loan, unless the institution can show real term risk.
• Money-like claims face money-like costs: full backing, Clear settlement and haircuts.
• The end-of-day zero reaches private books: interbank clearing balances settle at each close in actual colors or collateral transferred outright.

The criteria are 🏛️ Amendable. Each classification is a published and appealable 📐 Bounded decision about a particular instrument. Because base supply is countable by color, reports can compare claims outstanding with base held.

The law cannot draw a permanent line between debt and money; it can make crossings slower, more visible and more expensive.

A run puts the rule in its 4 a.m. boardroom: par redemption will be presented as the only way to open markets by breakfast. The 🟪 purple rule generalizes: rescue people and functions, not unauthorized paper at par.

The state may lend 🟦 blue against eligible collateral at published haircuts, honor insurance priced in advance or authorize a 🌸 pink vintage for public support. The brown claim still takes its contractual or market loss. Paying par replaces a private promise with a public one and teaches the next issuer to expect the same conversion.

The ban cannot prevent that choice; it makes par rescue a visible constitutional breach.

Across borders

The country can still present one unit abroad. Imports, exports and debt may be quoted in its 🌈 rainbow and settled through the component markets. Canadian 🌈 rainbow and Japanese 🌈 rainbow would trade the way national currencies do now; foreign firms would not handle local 🟪 purple or physical 🟧 orange.

Effects on monetary power:

• Store of value may improve. 🟨 Yellow offers a countable asset that cannot be issued at will, though trust, convertibility and political stability still matter.
• Market depth may worsen. Splitting one large base into several component markets makes each easier to move. Routine tax conversions help liquidity but do not guarantee it.
• Sanctions and clearing change less. Those powers come mainly from economic scale and network effects, not the number of domestic ledgers.

🟩 Green stays national. A global 🟩 green tied to all human movement would turn births, deaths and displacement anywhere into one enormous monetary control surface.

The published prices also reveal vulnerabilities. 🌸 Pink shows confidence in emergency finance, 🟪 purple points to weak municipalities and 🟩 green reveals membership shocks. Adversaries can use the same disclosures to choose where to apply pressure.

Transparency is a tool, not the goal

Visibility lets citizens contest monetary costs. 🟦 Blue shows discretionary issuance, 🟪 purple shows municipal strain and 🌸 pink shows confidence in an emergency promise.

Visibility is deliberately limited. 🌸 Pink stays out of the price unit so a crisis does not automatically become the price of bread. 🟪 Purple exposure is capped so workers do not bear an unlimited market verdict. 🟧 Orange exists because a society in which every payment is recorded has created a different kind of danger.

A published number can still be misunderstood, manipulated or become the focus of a run. Publication is not the same as explanation. The best public rules are not the most mathematical ones; they are the ones whose promise and breach an ordinary person can recognize.

The rulebook

The numerical values in this guide are placeholders. The allocation of authority is the proposal.

Each color names an issuer, a way into and out of circulation, and a fact the public can check. The four governance classes say how those rules may change.

Breaches remain possible and specific: minting extra 🟨 yellow, rescuing 🟪 purple at par, redeeming unprotected 🟤 brown at par, extending a 🌸 pink promise past its date or carrying a Clear balance overnight. Those acts can be debated as breaches rather than hidden as adjustments.

A monetary promise depends on who may change its rules, the procedure they must follow and how much warning the public receives.