Fiat Ludus. Let there be a game.
A game is only fair when everybody playing can read the rules and nobody can change them halfway through. That's the decree this piece answers: a game where the house writes the rules, changes them whenever it wants, and signs you up before you're old enough to read them.
Fiat Ludus is built on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Children's Games, painted in 1560. Bruegel packed a town square with over 230 children playing 83 different games, and there isn't an adult anywhere. Nobody's refereeing. Every rule in that square is one the kids agreed on, and any kid who doesn't like it can walk off and start another game.
Mine has adults, and the ones running things are skulls with a $ on them.
I kept Bruegel's square and his view from above, with the games spread out evenly and nobody in the middle. Then I let the house in. It posts its rules in a game hall, signs the kids up at a school, runs the games and collects in the arena. The kids are still playing, inside somebody else's rules now, and nobody showed them the rules.
The house rules
In the middle, under the arches, the columns are lettered FIAT and every bay holds a game. INFLATION INVADERS marches little $ signs down its screen under SAVINGS 0000. The BAILOUT game reads GAME OVER, then CONTINUE? INSERT TAXPAYER. A poster beside them says A LITTLE INFLATION IS GOOD FOR YOU, and in smaller letters, ASK YOUR BANKER.
On the far wall, under its own lamp, the house posts its rules:
- THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS
- TOKENS HAVE NO CASH VALUE
- PRIZES SUBJECT TO CHANGE
- RULES MAY CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE
- NO HOARDING TOKENS
Number four eats the other four, and it's the one the dollar runs on. Nobody holding dollars gets a vote on how many more there'll be next year, or on the target, or on when the target moves. The rules are on the wall, and the wall says they can change.
In front of the hall, where you'd expect a floor, there's a sand pit with two horned $ skulls sunk in it up to the waist. The house is built on it.
The next bays hold the prizes. A claw machine lettered WIN A HOME, $1 PLAY, has a heap of tiny houses at the bottom of the glass and one hanging in the claw. At the prize counter behind it, rule three is doing its job: the tags are crossed out and written higher, 50 to 90, and 200 and 450 both to 1,000.
The posters on this wall are the house's homework. SAVERS ARE HOARDERS, SPEND IT TODAY. Next to it, THE DOLLAR, AS GOOD AS GOLD, with OFFER ENDED AUG 15, 1971 in small print along the bottom.
Johan Huizinga, who wrote Homo Ludens in 1938, noticed that people go a lot easier on a cheat than on a spoilsport. The cheat pretends to keep the rules, so the game goes on. The spoilsport walks off the field and shows everybody it was only ever a game. The house is the cheat, the saver is the spoilsport, and the house has a poster calling him a hoarder.
The post
In front of the hall stands a stone post lettered RULES, with the house's whole curriculum at the bottom: 1. PLAY 2. PAY 3. STAY. Behind it, a man with his back to you wears a shirt that says 21 MILLION, THE ONLY RULE THEY CAN'T MOVE.
That's the other kind of rule. Bitcoin's supply schedule is written into the software every node runs, and every node checks every block against it. A miner who tries to pay himself more than the rule allows gets his block thrown out by everybody else. Nobody has to post it on a wall or trust anybody to keep it.
The school
Ludus means school, so the house runs one. On the left side of the square, under a PLAY TO WIN plaque and a $ crest, a sign reads LUDUS MAGNUS, ENROLL, AGES 5 TO 65, EASY LOANS, APPLY NOW. Five to sixty-five is first grade to retirement, and the loans come with it. The balcony beside it says PLAY NOW · PAY LATER.
Hanging next to that sign is a big ₿ emblem ringed with BETTER MONEY and BETTER WORLD. The two are a few feet apart, and only one of them wants you to sign anything.
Down the slope, the frieze along the front of the school quotes Seneca: WE LEARN, NOT FOR LIFE, BUT FOR SCHOOL. He meant it as a complaint, around AD 65, and it still describes most of what anybody's been taught about money.
Under the frieze sits the reward machine: a riveted dome with FED on its dials, a counter stuck at 99999 and CREDIT across its front. Out of its glowing $ mouth comes a stream of dog biscuits shaped like bones, every one stamped DEBT, pouring down a ramp between two posts lettered GOOD and BOY.
Do what the school says, and the machine hands you debt and calls it a treat.
A few steps away, a $ skull kneels by a basket of bone biscuits, and two masked kids crawl on their hands and knees after the bones he's scattered. Next to them, a jack-in-the-box has popped, and what's on the spring is a $ skull in a clown's ruff.
The hopscotch
A hooded skull in a long patterned robe stands on a crate stenciled IOU and points down at a hopscotch court. The first square says $1.00. Then $0.77, $0.55, $0.24 and $0.12, $0.08, $0.06 and $0.04, $0.02, and the last square says DEBT. Every hop is worth less than the one before, and he's pointing down the line the way a teacher points at the board.
Below the crate, another skull stands at a chalkboard: 2% IS HEALTHY. INFLATION IS TRANSITORY. Both lines came out of the Federal Reserve. It made 2 percent its official target in January 2012, and in 2021 it kept calling inflation transitory until its chairman retired the word that November.
Down in the corner of the board, a masked kid has reached up with the chalk and written PLAN ₿.
The games
Bruegel's kids wear masks. In mine the people in the square wear one, the Satoshi mask with a ₿ on the brow, kids included. The house wears its own face, a skull with a $ on it.
There's a shop for the masks, with ONE MASK FITS ALL on a pennant, HIDE YOUR FACE on the wall and NO KYC on the door. An android in a mask stands in the doorway holding out a spare.
Everything the house does in this square starts with knowing who you are: the ENROLL clipboard, the camera on the field, the line marked KYC. The mask keeps your face out of its files.
Bubbles
At the toy stall, a woman on the bench blows a bubble through a long brass horn, a bowl of soapy water in her other hand. The shelves behind her hold dolls, old money tins lettered MARK, LIRA and FRANC, and tulips.
Up the hill, the bubbles get bigger. One glass sphere has tulips growing out of the top and 1637 and 1720 on its side. The other has a hen sitting on a WALL STREET egg, and 1929 and 2008. The tulips in Holland, the South Sea Company, the crash of 1929 and the crash of 2008: every one of them popped. A cart beside them sells APPLES 5¢ under a flag that says DEPRESSION.
Blind man's bluff
A masked boy has a cloth tied over his mask and his arms out, feeling for whoever's closest. The man lunging in beside him holds up a big bunch of balloons, every one printed with a $. The boy can't see the balloons, and he can't see who's holding the strings.
Behind them stands a row of bowling pins, each marked with a $, and one's already down. The ball coming for the rest is orange with a ₿ on it, swinging low in the hand of a kid running up to bowl.
Loaded dice
Right behind the bowler, the house plays its own game. A leather dice cup with a $ tooled into it lies tipped over, and three dice have rolled out. Every one of them landed with a red $ on top. They're loaded, lying right out in the open, and nobody's calling the house a cheat. Standing over them is a $ skull android with FIAT on his chest and a long whip in his fist.
The porter and the marbles
Bruegel has a game called playing the porter. In mine, a fat sack lettered STIMULUS sits tied off on a park bench next to a masked android, with a mousetrap baited with a $ coin at the other end. Down on the ground, a masked boy walks away with the same kind of sack over his shoulder. His says THE BILL.
The stimulus sits on the bench. The bill walks off on a kid's back.
Between them, a gumball machine has 1¢, 5¢ and 10¢ crossed out on its price card. It's 25¢ now. Below it, two masked kids crouch at a ring of marbles, and one marble in the ring is orange, with a ₿ on it.
The well
A kid in a teal sweater flips a $ coin toward a brick well lettered SAVINGS ACCOUNT. Look under the well. It's sitting on the rim of a vault door, and that vault comes back in the arena.
Next to it sits a stone block marked 1913 and THE FED, and a $ skull with a scepter stands over a rubber stamp and three red $ marks stamped straight onto the rock. The Federal Reserve Act was signed in 1913.
The blocks
The building blocks each carry a currency and a year: the pound and 1931, when Britain came off gold; the yen and 1973, when it was cut loose to float; the euro and its 1999 launch; the dollar and AUG 15, 1971; a ruble; and Z$ 2008, the peak of Zimbabwe's hyperinflation. They're stacked like a crooked staircase, and they're coming down.
Walking along a plank laid across two sawhorses next to them, a boy in a plaid shirt holds out a leather ledger, strapped shut, with a $ in the wax seal and AUDIT across the cover in gold. That's the fiat audit: a sealed book handed from one insider to the next. Bitcoin's audit is public. Anybody with a laptop and a copy of the chain can count every coin in existence and check the total against the schedule.
The field
Behind the hall, the ground opens into a playing field. Musical chairs is running: a row of school chairs, players standing around them, and a $ skull at the end of the row working an old gramophone. The wall underneath carries the rule of that game: WHILE THE MUSIC PLAYS, YOU MUST DANCE. That's Citigroup's Chuck Prince in July 2007, a few months before the chairs ran out. Fiat Lucrum tells the whole story.
Down by the goal, the house has roped off a line with brass posts and red velvet, leading up the path to a sign that says KYC, WAIT HERE, under a camera on a pole. Know your customer: the paperwork that tells the house exactly who's playing. The line's empty.
On the stairs beside the goal, a masked woman holds up the score on a wooden paddle: HOUSE 9. YOU 0.
The arena
Ludus has a third meaning, and it lives at the bottom of the square. There's an arena cut into the ground there, a round stone pit with a stair winding down its inside wall, and carved along the rim: MORITURI TE SALUTANT, those who are about to die salute you. Suetonius records it from AD 52, shouted to the emperor Claudius by condemned men about to fight a staged sea battle.
Over the pit, on a pedestal, sits a round platform with arrows carved around its rim, and three people stand on it, one of them holding a briefcase. It's the top. Bruegel's kids whip their tops to keep them spinning, and here the house has the whip. Under the platform, sand runs out of a funnel into the pit.
Down in the pit, a towering $ skull robot with RECRUITER on his chest plate and a $ on his shield holds out a clipboard with ENROLL across the top of the form. A masked young man in a brown T-shirt is reaching for it. Bolted to the floor at the robot's feet, a shackle on a chain lies open, waiting for him.
A wolf built like a machine paces the floor of the pit, FIAT on its flank. In front of it lie the kids' toys, a hoop and its stick and a wooden top, dropped where they stopped rolling, next to a smashed piggy bank.
Over the wolf, birdcages hang on chains, tagged 6102. Executive Order 6102 made Americans hand in their gold in April 1933. Most of the cages still have a yellow bird in them. One door is open, and the bird that was in it, the orange one, is out and flying.
Behind the cages, a dartboard hangs under a sign that says PRACTICE, with 2% in the bullseye. The dart landed way out in the outer ring, next to a tag that reads 9.1%. In June 2022, consumer prices were up 9.1 percent from a year before, the biggest jump in 40 years.
Next to the board, a brick chute drops into a riveted pot hung over a fire, with TARGET : 2% around its rim. A block lettered 1946 and PENGŐ is coming down the chute, and a 1923 block with a big M on it is already in the fire. In 1923 the German mark went to nothing, and in 1946 Hungary's pengő went through the worst hyperinflation ever recorded. The number on the pot never moves.
On the arena floor lies the board. Its squares run RENT, WAGES, TAX, FEES, INTEREST, DEBT, USURY, all the way to JAIL. In 1904 a woman named Lizzie Magie patented The Landlord's Game, built to show how rent drains a town, with a jail right on the board. The game that grew out of it is the one you played as a kid.
At the far end of the board stands the vault, its door shut under a big $ wheel, and the plaque beside it reads RESERVES ZERO PERCENT SINCE 2020. That's where the SAVINGS ACCOUNT well drains. On March 26, 2020, the Federal Reserve cut the reserve requirement for American banks to zero.
The cells on either side of the vault have their bars bent apart, a busted $ padlock lies on the ground, and two masked women ride a mechanical bull out past the bars, down a ramp onto the board.
In the corner, a frog sits in a pot of water over a low flame. The gauge on the side reads 2%. He hasn't noticed yet.
The way out
So how do you leave? None of the answers are on the house's board.
At the top of the square stands the tower with LUDUS MAGNUS across it, Bruegel's big civic building turned into the school. A knotted bedsheet hangs from one of its upper windows, and a masked figure in black sits on the parapet right beside it. At the far end of the roof, somebody else is climbing a rope.
On the right side of the square, a line of people has hold of what looks like a tug-of-war rope. Follow it to the end. There's no team on the other side. The last kid in the line has yanked a power cord, and the plug has just come out of a machine lettered FIAT and SOUND, a stack of speakers on gears. Right beside it, a $ skull on a barrel cart strums a harp lettered PLAY TO WIN and SOUNDS LIKE FUN.
Pull the plug and the music stops. That's when everybody finds out how many chairs there are.
An honest reading
It's easy to read this piece as the masks against the skulls. A few things in it make that too clean.
Near the school, someone in the mask, ₿ on his brow, has a headset strapped over his eyes, its cable running to a case lettered FIAT VISION. The $ skull standing next to him is the one holding it. The kids crawling after the biscuits are masked. So are the three people on the spinning top, and so is the young man reaching for the ENROLL clipboard. Knowing the dollar is rigged has never stopped anybody from clocking in, taking the loan or feeding the claw machine.
The difference is that Bruegel's kids could walk away from any game in the square, because nobody owned it. You were enrolled in this one at five, by the sign's own count, and the school isn't going to send you a letter saying you can go. Leaving starts small, with a key you hold yourself and savings the house can't print against.
In plain sight
Every choice in this piece is out where you can see it.
The house letters its words on its own property, under a $ or across a machine. The people write on whatever they've got with them, 21 MILLION on a T-shirt or PLAN ₿ on a chalkboard.
The house is a skull wherever it's in charge, and no kid in the square is a skull.
Prices in dollars only go one way, from the prize counter to the grill up in this plaza, CANTILLON'S, where the 5¢ on the HOT DOGS sign is crossed out and the new sign says $9. Lucrum spent a whole section on who gets the new money first.
And Bruegel's view stays the way he had it, high up and spread evenly, with no hero at the center. Up here a line of masked people follows a skeleton in a top hat while a woman nearby holds up a BTC flag. You have to go looking for every one of them, the same way you do in Bruegel's square.
Why it holds up over years
From across a room, it's a town square full of people, with a tower at the top and an arena at the bottom. Walk closer and it turns into games, the way Bruegel's does: the hopscotch, the marbles, the well, the dice.
The words take longer. MORITURI TE SALUTANT reads from a few feet away. Others only show up once you're close enough to fog the glass, like OFFER ENDED AUG 15, 1971 along the bottom of a poster, or WAIT HERE under KYC on a sign smaller than a postage stamp.
And one price in this square goes the other way. Next to the IOU crate, someone has set out a flat of carrots with a chalk sign: 7,500, crossed out. 5,000, crossed out. 3,000 SATS. Two masked men, one in a cowboy hat, have hold of the same bunch. Priced in sats, the carrots keep getting cheaper. That's what happens to prices when nobody can print more of the money.
Out on the open ground on the right, there's a relay. One masked runner carries a scroll lettered WHITE PAPER. Below him, a runner in orange with a ₿ on his chest holds out a brass key, and a third runner has his hand open, ready to take it.
There isn't a skull anywhere near it. Nobody's keeping score, and there's no board of rules on a wall. The rules were written down first, on nine pages, on October 31, 2008, and anybody can read them. After that, the key just gets passed from hand to hand.
Nobody showed you the house's rules. These ones you can read for yourself.
Better money, better world.
The print. 30 x 20 inches on Hahnemühle German Etching 310gsm. Signed and numbered, edition of 10, $600. Certificate of authenticity timestamped on Bitcoin. The edition is open now. See the print.
Fiat Ludus is the fourth of the Ten Decrees. The third, Fiat Palea, sorts the harvest. The second, Fiat Lucrum, is the party the money came from. The first, Furia Fiat, is the one with VERIFY cut over the gate.
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