Fiat is Latin for let it be done. A decree, issued once, with nobody asked. Palea is chaff: the dry husk around a grain of wheat, the part of the harvest nobody can eat.
Separating the two is about as old as farming, and it's never needed an authority. You take the threshed harvest out and throw it in the wind. The grain is heavy, so it drops back onto the floor. The chaff is light, so the wind carries it off. Whatever is left gets swept into a pile and burned. Three tests: wind, weight and fire, and nobody can vote on any of those things. Wheat is wheat because of what it weighs.
Fiat Palea. Let there be chaff.
That's the decree this piece answers: skip the test and count the chaff as the harvest. Print it, heap it on a wagon, and call the heap wealth.
Fiat Palea is built on Hieronymus Bosch's Haywain Triptych. Bosch built it on a Flemish proverb: the world is like a haywain, and each man takes what he can. He painted a wagon heaped with hay rolling across the world, the whole of society scrambling after it. Peasants climb it, nuns stuff it into sacks, and a man is cutting another's throat. The pope, the emperor, a king and a duke ride behind it on horseback, in no hurry at all. Devils haul the whole thing toward hell, Christ watches from the clouds, and almost nobody looks up.
Hay is cut, dried stalks, what's left of a field once the grain is gone. Bosch's crowd is killing each other over it, and the grain was never on that wagon.
In mine, the stalks are printed.
Mine is one panel, read left to right the way his three are, and it follows the harvest from one end of the farm to the other. There's a garden where the money is counted, and a wagon heaped with the chaff with people climbing it. Past the wagon stands a machine that makes wind, and at the far end there's a furnace with two mouths: one for what's worth keeping and another for the chaff.
Paradise
Bosch opens his story on the left wing. The rebel angels are thrown out of heaven, Eve is drawn out of Adam's side, the serpent waits in the tree, and an archangel with a sword stands guard at the bridge out of paradise. I kept the garden and added a count, the one thing Bosch never had to think about.
The tower on the far left says BITCOIN. The copper dome beside it says BETTER MONEY, and the wall below it reads BETTER WORLD. Standing about where Bosch put the creation, a woman in a long gray-green robe holds both hands out open. Her collar is lettered BETTER MONEY, with a ₿ on her brow and another on her belt. At her feet a bearded man lies back on a lounger, awake, head tipped up.
Nobody in this garden is grabbing. There's nothing here you could grab ahead of anybody else, because the terms are lettered on the buildings.
The snake
It goes wrong at the tree, the way it does for Bosch. A mechanical serpent coils up the trunk with its tail wrapped around the wood, and its eye is a $. It hangs its head right over a couple standing under the branches, both in the mask, his hand on her shoulder.
They're looking at each other.
The offer hasn't changed in the five hundred years since Bosch painted it: an easier money, more of it for less work. Every fiat currency ever issued was sold on that offer, and it got taken every time. Down in the bottom corner of the same patch of grass, a $ skull locust is already crawling into the garden.
The fall
Bosch's rebel angels turn into insects as they fall through the clouds above paradise.
The sky over my garden is full of winged skeletons with a $ on every skull and a segmented insect body where the ribs give out, tumbling out of the clouds in a swarm, and the air around them is thick with dollar bills falling at exactly their speed.
The money comes down from the top, and the ones who sent it come down with it.
Two founding dates
In the long grass at the bottom left, below the garden, stand two tall panels lettered SUPPLY and INFINITE. Next to them sits a riveted machine with PRINT across its lid, EST. 1913 under that, and FEDERAL RESERVE on the front, and there's a hand resting on its red button. The Federal Reserve Act was signed in 1913. We’ve had to deal with the repercussions ever since.
A few steps away stand two androids in the mask. The taller one wears a small badge on his chest: ∞ over 21m. Everything divided by 21 million, the title of Knut Svanholm's book. The smaller one wears his own stamp across his chest plate: BETTER MONEY, EST. 2009.
It's the same kind of stamp with a different founding date, and one of the two supply schedules ends. Up the slope toward the garden, a deer wears 21m on its hide like a brand.
Further down, a steel barrel lettered NODE lies in the grass with a ₿ glowing in its open end, its cable running through the stalks to two posts by the road. Each post has six amber lamps lit and reads 6/6 FINAL. Six confirmations is the old rule of thumb for calling a Bitcoin payment final, and once it's there, no one can reach back and undo it. Behind the posts a drum lies dead in the weeds, branches growing through it, lettered RESERVES, 0%. In March 2020 the Federal Reserve cut the reserve requirement for American banks to zero.
The grab
Now the middle, where Bosch put the hay.
Cut into the hill above the road there's a vault, and the lintel over its door reads EX NIHILO: out of nothing. The doors stand open, the shelves inside are empty and hung with cobwebs, and a small plaque over a keypad on the wall outside reads GOLD WINDOW CLOSED.
On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon closed the gold window. Up the hill, a winged $ stands on a plinth with FIAT STANDARD and 1971 on its base. Every dollar since then has been backed by the decree that it's a dollar.
Two people in the mask, ₿ on their brows, are walking out of the vault toward you.
The printer and the scale
Above the vault sits the machine that fills the wagon. It's a riveted sphere of gears with one huge lens for an eye, a crane lettered NO LIMIT swinging out over the hillside, and its core stenciled BRRRR and M2. Bills pour out of its spout and slide down the slope toward the road.
Now look below the crane: a balance scale. One pan is heaped with bills and the other holds a small pile of gold coins, and the heap of bills rides high while the gold sits low.
That's the second test. You can print a dollar by decree, or a trillion of them, and none of it changes what they weigh against a handful of gold. The printer has NO LIMIT written along its arm, and no matter how much it prints, it can't make that pan go down.
The wagon
A mountain of dollar bills is heaped on a wooden wagon bed, a $ on the hub of every wheel, with the proverb acted out on every side of it.
A man in a fedora and a brown suit stands knee-deep in the bills with a pitchfork in one hand, reaching into the pile with the other. A ladder leans against the right side, and a climber is coming down it with a hay fork. The beam under the foot of the ladder is lettered PALEA. A long-haired man with a pack on his back leans over from the big drum at the end of the wagon, reaching for a fistful. Right on top, a $ skeleton sits with a sack lettered CHAFF at his side.
A pitchfork and a hay fork are what you winnow with: you toss the harvest up on them and let the wind do the sorting. Everybody on this pile has the tool in hand, and they're using it to shovel chaff.
Bosch harnessed a team of devils to his wagon: creatures with long snouts, a fish, a deer with antlers. Nothing is hitched to mine. The two white horses belong to the procession and walk alongside it. This wagon gets to the fire without anybody dragging it, the same way a currency with no limit gets to zero without anybody ever deciding it should.
The procession
Behind the pile come the people it's for. Bosch painted the pope, the emperor, a king and a duke following the hay on horseback, and all three of mine are skulls marked with a $. The pope is on foot, in a mitre with a $ on it and a robe hung with FIAT medallions, PALEA stitched on his sleeve. Beside him walk two white horses. One carries a bearded skull in a gold crown and a brown business suit. The other carries a skull in a gray suit and a red tie, reins in hand.
The king carries the sign himself, on a pole in his fist. It reads LET THERE BE CHAFF, with FIAT PALEA underneath in small letters.
None of them climbs the pile. They ride beside it, close enough to take what they want first, which is the Cantillon effect Fiat Lucrum spent a whole section on.
Just below the pope, a money chest sits in the dust lettered CHAFF, FIAT and PALEA, and across the lid, split by a $ hasp, LEGAL TENDER. That one's a law: federal statute makes Federal Reserve notes legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes and dues. Nobody ever needed a statute to make them take grain. Bitcoin went twelve years before any country made it legal tender, and people took it the whole time.
The collector
Bosch put four nuns at the side of his wagon stuffing hay into sacks, with a monk sitting beside them. That scene's in here too, without the habits.
Off the lower right of the pile, a woman kneels over a sack lettered CHAFF while a girl reaches into it, and a woman in a headscarf hands a full one across at arm's length. The one taking it is a $ skull android in a belted trench coat with one word lettered on his pocket: Collector. His palm is out, and there's an open chest of bills behind him.
He doesn't climb and he doesn't ride. He stands where he is and the sack comes to him.
The wheel
In Bosch, the throat-cutting happens beside the wagon, and the wheels roll on past it. Beside my wagon there's a different wheel: Rota Fortunae, the wheel of fortune. Medieval artists showed a king climbing one side of it, sitting on top, pitched off the far side, and lying flat underneath. Mine has the words on the outer rim: BOOM on the way up, BUST on the way down, and BAILOUT across the bottom, right where the wheel meets the dirt.
A $ skull in a vest lies sprawled across the top, clutching a CHAFF bag to his chest. Another skeleton has him by the shoulder and is driving a dagger in. Whoever's riding it when the wheel turns gets the knife, and the bailout waits at ground level for whoever's still attached.
The one supply schedule in this piece that doesn't go round is the one stamped 21m. It has no boom to ride up and no bailout at the bottom.
Look up
On top of Bosch's hay, beside the lovers and their music, an angel prays with its face turned up toward Christ in the clouds.
At the top of my heap, above the bills, there's a pile of gears with a tree growing out of it, and a woman in the mask is carrying a red flag with a ₿ on it up the slope. At the highest point a masked figure stands with both arms straight up and his head tipped all the way back. He's in the angel's exact spot, and he's looking straight up.
What he's looking at hangs in the sky dead center, in a burst of light, about where Bosch put Christ: a masked figure with arms spread wide, a ₿ on his brow, his chest and his belt.
The wind
The first test is the wind, and a fanning mill is a machine that makes it.
There's one standing in the middle of the grab, just below the wagon's wheels. It has a crank on the side, a feed tray heaped with bills with SEPARATOR lettered along its front, and a big fan wheel with a $ on its hub that throws the bills out the side in a spray. Gold coins are stacked on the box at the top of the machine.
Next to it, a boy in a brown jacket stands with his hands on his hips. Beside him a striped bin lettered FLEETING VALUE is on fire, a heap of cash burning inside it.
The separator works. It sorts the harvest the way winnowers always have. The bills are light, so the fan throws them clear, and they sail across the ground and down into a crack in the earth. The heavy part falls out the bottom, and at the end of the machine's wooden tray a pile of real grain lies on the ground.
Nobody's fighting over it. The crowd is back at the wagon.
A test that runs on physics can't be decreed around, and it doesn't care who owns the harvest. Every full node on the Bitcoin network runs a test like that on every block it's handed: it checks the work and checks the rules, whatever fails gets thrown out, and nobody gets a vote. You don't need permission to pick up the grain, either.
The pit
The bills land in the crack, and the crack opens into a pit where $ skulls claw at the money as it pours in on top of them.
Standing at the edge of that pit is an android twice the size of anybody around it, white plating, the mask on its face, a ₿ on its brow and another on its chest, holding a rope. A few yards away stands a second one just like it.
The fire
Bosch's right wing is hell, and his hell has a strange detail: it isn't finished. Devils are putting up a round tower, hauling their materials up a long ladder.
Mine is coming down. A round tower studded with $ wheels burns from the top, and on the far hill a crane lettered FEDERAL WRECKING swings a ball with a $ on it. A climber in the mask, WHOOPS across his vest, hangs off a steel derrick pouring a can lettered GAS onto the flames, and out on the cliff a castle signed FRACTIONAL RESERVE SCAM and BAILOUT MELTDOWN is burning from every tower.
At the foot of all of it stands the furnace.
Two mouths
The furnace is round and riveted, and it has two arched doors.
The left one is barred with thick steel. Stacks of gold coins sit behind the bars with flames licking up at them, and a sign on the brick with an arrow points them out: YIELD. The right one stands open and full of burning bills, and its sign points that way: CHAFF ONLY.
That's the last of the three tests. Gold comes out of a fire as gold.
In front of the gold, two $ skulls in work clothes drag themselves across the dirt toward the bars, one of them on a metal leg. They're never getting through. A $ skull android walks out of the burning door with a gold coin in his hand and holds it out to the next skull along, who takes it. The gold changes hands in front of the fire, between skulls, while the two on the ground are still crawling.
Who lights it
Around the side of the furnace, a man in a long hooded coat has a flamethrower on the brickwork, a fuel hose running to his belt, a ₿ on his brow and another on his buckle. The crowd around him is in hoods and headscarves, and every face in it wears the mask with a ₿ on the brow.
On the brick beside them, a sign with an arrow reads CHAFF ONLY. Just above the crowd, an android with BTC across her chest stands next to a raven, holding a lit torch. The people who figured it out aren't waiting for somebody else to light the furnace.
The egg in the straw
Above the furnace, on top of a big round vault mouth, sits a hut thatched in straw with a red toadstool cap for a roof. Inside it, on a nest of straw, is an egg with a ₿ on its shell. An android stands beside the hut holding a sheaf of the same straw, and its chest reads 01/03 2009 and BTC. January 3, 2009, is the day the first block of the Bitcoin network was mined.
Up on the pile the chaff gets chased, and down in the furnace it gets burned. Here it's a nest.
Bolted across the vault mouth under the hut is a plate that reads WINDOW, and under that, NO REDEMPTION. It's the gold window again, seen from the other side. Since August 15, 1971, a dollar redeems for another dollar and nothing else. The egg sitting above that plate doesn't need a window, because nobody can issue more of what's inside it.
Hostages
To the right of the furnace, two cages and a crate stand in the dirt.
The top cage is lettered RESERVES, and there's nothing in it. The one underneath has a keypad lock and a $ badge, FIAT-TRAP across the top and HOSTAGES along the bottom, and there's a man inside it, hunched on the floor with crumpled bills scattered around him like bait. The crate beside them is lettered COLLATERAL, and it's empty as well.
Two of the three are empty, and the one that isn't holds a person. RESERVES echoes the dead drum back by the road.
A few steps away, a mechanical lizard with a $ on its snout dangles a key from its claw, and the tag on the key reads CUSTODY. That's who's holding it. The answer to a cage with a keypad is a key you hold yourself, and with Bitcoin nobody has to issue it to you.
The dates on the ground
At the foot of the furnace, the dates are lying in the dirt.
A steel cart tipped up at one end, overflowing with bills and burning along the ground, carries TOO BIG TO FAIL on its rail and a plate that reads 15 SEP 2008. That's the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The next day, the Federal Reserve authorized a loan of up to $85 billion to AIG.
A few feet away sits a crate stenciled EXECUTIVE ORDER 6102, next to a heap of straw. On April 5, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt signed the order requiring Americans to turn their gold coin, bullion and gold certificates in to the Federal Reserve.
Both of those are fiat dates, stamped on the system's own freight. The one Bitcoin date down this end of the piece is on the android by the egg.
The enforcer
Walking out of the furnace's shadow comes the one who keeps order: a $ skull in white armor plates, ENFORCER on one side of his chest and NOVUS ORDO on the other. NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM is printed on the back of every one-dollar bill, under the pyramid. His pack is lettered CHAFF and DIRTY FIAT, with a $ badge and a biohazard mark, and it spills bills behind him as he walks.
He's the one taking the gold coin from the skull that walked out of the fire. Close by, a Satoshi with a rucksack has a blowpipe aimed at him.
The music moved
On top of Bosch's hay, a wealthy couple sits with their music, and a devil beside them blows a trumpet. The pleasure and the music ride the wagon all the way to hell.
In mine the music has left the wagon for a ledge at the edge of the fire, where a woman in a long green gown, a ₿ on her brow, sits playing a guitar. Kneeling next to her, an android in the mask plays a long flared pipe, and what he's playing to is a cobra with a $ on its hood, rising out of a glass flask inside a wire cage.
In Bosch the devil keeps the tune and the people on the hay let it carry them off. Here the masked are the ones playing, and the dollar is the one being charmed, caged up at the edge of the fire.
An honest reading
It's easy to read this piece as a diagram: Bitcoin on the left, fiat in the middle, fire on the right, pick one. Three things in it make that reading too clean.
The first is that the mask is on the pile. The fedora man knee-deep in the bills is wearing it, and so is the climber on the ladder. Up on the derrick, a man in the mask is pouring gas on a fire with WHOOPS across his vest. Knowing what the money is has never stopped anybody from reaching for it.
The second is that the separator works, and the grain is just lying there. Nobody's forcing anybody onto that pile. The machine that sorts it stands in the middle of the crowd, and the egg has been in its straw since January 2009. The pile is a choice people keep making.
The third is that the fire sorts the harvest, and the skulls still get to the gold first. In Fiat Lucrum I drew who drinks first. Here I drew what comes after the fire. The gold comes out, and the first hands on it are skulls, passing it between themselves while two of their own crawl toward the bars and never arrive. A reset doesn't make anybody whole if somebody else holds the key to the vault, which is why the only answer I trust is to hold your own.
Crafted, not generated
Every one of these is a choice you can see.
The angels fall with the money. The gold goes behind bars on the left and the chaff burns on the right, and the signs over the two doors say YIELD and CHAFF ONLY. Nothing is hitched to the wagon. The scale is chained to the printer's own arm. The music moved from the top of the hay to the edge of the fire and changed hands on the way. The grain sits at the foot of the separator where anybody could walk up and take it.
The faces run in three registers. The mask and the ₿ go on the people who've figured it out. The $ skull goes on the institutions and the machines. The plain faces belong to the ones it's happening to: the boy by the separator, the man in the cage, the woman kneeling over the sack by the Collector.
Why it holds up over years
From the doorway it's a landscape: a green garden on the left, a gray mountain in the middle, fire on the right.
Walk closer and it becomes the harvest, told in order, from the counted garden past the pile and the machine that makes wind to the two doors of the furnace.
The words take longer. Some of them you'll read from a few feet away, like EX NIHILO over the vault, SUPPLY INFINITE in the grass and 6102 on the crate. Others only show up once you're close enough to fog the glass: CONFIRMATIONS up the side of a lamp post, CUSTODY on a tag smaller than a fingernail, NO REDEMPTION on a window nobody's opened since 1971.
And down in the bottom left corner, at the edge of the road, the Wayfarer.
When you close Bosch's Haywain, the two outer wings meet and make one last scene: a peddler in rags, bent under the basket on his back, fending off a dog with his stick as he walks past a robbery and a hanged man. It's what you see before the triptych opens, and it's what you're left with when it shuts.
Mine stands just inside the edge of the piece, in the long grass by the rutted road. He's in gray coveralls with a ₿ on the back of his vest, and his mask is turned side-on. He isn't carrying anything. He isn't on the pile and he's nowhere near the fire. A machine stag stands next to him and looks straight out at you.
He's standing where you're standing, back to you, looking at what you're looking at. Bosch's wayfarer kept walking. This one has stopped long enough to watch it all get sorted.
Throw it in the air and see what comes down.
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 Palea is the third of the Ten Decrees. The second, Fiat Lucrum, is the party this harvest came from. The first, Furia Fiat, is the one with VERIFY cut over the gate.
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