For thousands of years, the authority to create money has been one of the clearest expressions of sovereign power. Kings and emperors struck coins bearing their images. Governments determined their weight and metallic content. Taxes and debts were denominated in them. Armies were paid with them.
The old expression “coin of the realm” therefore meant more than money in circulation. Coinage was an expression of the realm itself.
Roman emperors understood this extraordinarily well. New emperors routinely issued coins bearing their portraits, titles and political messages. Coins traveled farther than proclamations and were handled by everyone from soldiers and merchants to farmers and laborers.
Money communicated authority, and when governments changed their money, the consequences could be profound.
During the Great Debasement of the 1540s, Henry VIII’s government dramatically reduced the precious-metal content of English coins, in large part to raise revenue during an extraordinarily expensive period of warfare. The coins still carried the authority of the Crown, but contained progressively less silver.
The lesson was an ancient one: The name printed on money and the value contained in money are not necessarily the same thing.
Napoleon understood the opposite side of that equation. In 1803, his government established the franc germinal, defining the franc in terms of precise quantities of gold and silver. It became one of the foundations of French monetary stability during the nineteenth century. Napoleon wasn’t merely redesigning France’s coins.
He was helping establish the monetary architecture of a new France.
America learned the importance of trustworthy money before it was even a country. Beginning in 1775, the Continental Congress needed enormous sums to finance the Revolutionary War but possessed extremely limited taxing power. It therefore financed part of the war by issuing Continental currency. More and more notes entered circulation.
Their value collapsed.
By the final years of the Revolution, Continental currency had depreciated so severely that the expression “not worth a Continental” entered American vocabulary.
Benjamin Franklin himself recognized that the depreciation had effectively operated as a form of taxation: the people holding the currency absorbed part of the cost of financing the Revolution through the loss of its purchasing power.
That lesson has echoed throughout monetary history. Governments can raise resources through taxation and borrowing. They can also create money.
But creating more units of money does not, by itself, create more houses, food, steel, electricity or productive capacity.
Ultimately, real wealth comes from things a society can produce and use.
The monetary system of the young United States was far less orderly than today’s dollar system. Spanish silver dollars circulated extensively. Foreign coins remained important for decades. State-chartered banks issued their own banknotes. The value and reliability of those notes could vary dramatically depending upon the issuing institution and how far the note had traveled from the bank that issued it.
The United States had established the dollar as its monetary unit in the eighteenth century, but Americans continued using a remarkable mixture of coins and banknotes.
During the nineteenth century, thousands of varieties of banknotes circulated. Some were perfectly sound. Some were questionable. Some were worthless.
Merchants relied upon publications known as bank-note reporters to determine what unfamiliar notes were actually worth. America had created a sovereign monetary unit, but it had not yet created the uniform national currency system we recognize today.
The Civil War helped change that.
When Abraham Lincoln entered the White House, the United States faced an existential crisis. A massive war had to be financed. In 1861, the federal government began issuing Demand Notes, the first widely circulated federal paper currency of the Civil War era. The familiar green ink used on later federal notes helped give American paper currency its enduring nickname:
GREENBACKS
Then came the United States Notes authorized during the war, followed by the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864. Rather than changing American money overnight, these measures progressively transformed it.
The federal government increasingly asserted control over the monetary system. Nationally chartered banks issued standardized notes backed according to federal rules, while federal policies eventually pushed most state-bank notes out of everyday circulation.
The dollar was becoming truly national.
For the first time, an American traveling hundreds of miles could increasingly expect the money in his pocket to be recognized under a common national monetary framework. The coin of the American realm had taken recognizable form.
For much of the following era, gold occupied a special position in the American monetary system. The exact rules changed considerably over time. The Civil War disrupted gold convertibility. Convertibility was later restored. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt fundamentally changed Americans’ relationship with monetary gold.
Then came Bretton Woods.
In 1944, representatives of Allied nations designed a new international monetary system. Other major currencies would maintain relationships with the dollar, while the United States committed to convert dollars held by foreign monetary authorities into gold at $35 per ounce. That arrangement placed the dollar at the center of the postwar financial system.
But underneath that system remained a physical reference point.
GOLD
An ounce of gold did not depend upon a government printing press for its existence. It had to be mined. It was scarce. It could be measured. It could be stored. And for centuries, people throughout the world had agreed that it possessed value.
Then, on August 15, 1971, everything changed.
Nixon Closes the Gold Window
President Richard Nixon announced that the United States would suspend the convertibility of dollars into gold for foreign monetary authorities. It became known as the Nixon Shock.
The Bretton Woods monetary architecture subsequently unraveled, and the world’s most important currency was no longer convertible into a fixed quantity of gold. The modern fiat-dollar era had begun.
But it is misleading to say that the dollar thereafter became worthless paper “backed by nothing.” Something enormously powerful stood behind it: The United States itself.
The federal government levied taxes in dollars. American debts were denominated in dollars. The world’s largest and deepest capital markets operated overwhelmingly in dollars. Treasury securities became a central reserve asset. International trade was heavily conducted in dollars. And one particular commodity became closely associated with that system.
OIL
The 1970s produced an extraordinarily important economic and strategic relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Oil exports were overwhelmingly priced in dollars, and the enormous dollar revenues accumulated by oil-producing nations were frequently invested back into dollar-denominated financial assets, including U.S. government securities. Economists came to describe this phenomenon as petrodollar recycling.
Because every industrial economy required energy, the dollar’s dominant role in global oil markets reinforced international demand for dollars and dollar assets. But an important historical distinction is often missed. Oil did not formally back the dollar.
A person holding $100 could not walk into the U.S. Treasury and demand a corresponding quantity of petroleum. And contrary to a widely circulated internet story, there was no 50-year U.S.-Saudi treaty requiring Saudi Arabia to sell oil exclusively in dollars that suddenly “expired” in June 2024. That story is mythology.
The reality is considerably more interesting. After gold convertibility ended, the dollar’s strength came increasingly from a network: the size of the American economy, taxation, Treasury markets, banking, international trade, military and geopolitical power, the rule of law, and the enormous global financial infrastructure built around the dollar.
Oil became an important component of that ecosystem. But oil was never the dollar’s new gold.
And that brings us to a much bigger question.
Money has never stopped evolving. Shells became coins. Coins became banknotes. Banknotes became bank deposits. Gold-backed money gave way to fiat money. Paper accounts became electronic ledgers.
And today trillions of dollars move around the planet without a single physical dollar changing hands. The next transformation may be more fundamental still. Because for the first time, technology makes it possible to create a digital monetary unit tied directly to a precisely measurable unit of something civilization actually consumes.
Not gold. Not oil.
ELECTRICITY
Electricity has several extraordinary characteristics. It is measurable. It is universally useful. It can be generated. It can be metered. It can be stored. It can be transmitted and delivered. It can perform work. And unlike gold, electricity is not primarily valuable because humanity has agreed that it is valuable.
Electricity is valuable because civilization literally runs on it. Turn off electricity long enough and modern banking stops. Communications stop. Factories stop. Data centers stop. Transportation systems begin shutting down. Artificial intelligence stops. Even the digital financial system itself stops.
Electricity is not merely another commodity participating in the modern economy. It is increasingly the commodity underneath the modern economy.
From the Gold Standard to an Energy Standard.
What if a monetary unit could represent a specific quantity of electricity? That is the idea behind FTG Energy Currency.
The concept developed and patented by inventor and electrical engineer Nick VandenBrekel begins with an unusually simple definition:
1 FTG = 10 kilowatt-hours of measured electricity.
The monetary unit is therefore not defined merely as an arbitrary digital token. It represents a defined quantity of energy. Ten kilowatt-hours in New York is physically the same quantity of energy as ten kilowatt-hours in London, Tokyo, Dubai or São Paulo.
The local price may change. The currency exchange rate may change. But the underlying unit of energy does not. A kilowatt-hour is a kilowatt-hour. That distinction will become enormously important.
A Different Kind of Store of Value
Gold became a monetary store of value largely because it combined scarcity, durability, divisibility and widespread acceptance. Electricity presents a different proposition. It is not merely something to possess. It is something that can do work.
Ten kilowatt-hours can illuminate a building, operate machinery, charge batteries, power computers, run appliances or contribute to operating a data center. That means an electricity-denominated monetary system introduces an unusual concept:
The underlying reference asset has productive utility.
FTG takes that concept further by connecting measured electricity, persistent energy storage and a digital ledger. Rather than asking people simply to trust that a digital unit has value, the architecture attempts to establish an auditable relationship between the digital monetary unit and measurable electrical energy. The implications will be significant.
The Next Coin of the Realm?
None of this means the dollar disappears tomorrow. It doesn’t mean governments suddenly abandon sovereign currencies. And it certainly doesn’t mean history has already selected electricity as the world’s next monetary standard.
Monetary systems change because millions, and eventually billions, of people, businesses, financial institutions and governments discover that a new system performs some monetary function better than the system that preceded it. Gold did that for centuries. The dollar did it on an unprecedented global scale during the twentieth century.
Digital money is now changing the mechanism again. And electricity introduces a possibility that previous generations simply did not possess: a globally measurable physical unit of productive energy represented and transferred through a digital monetary system.
Perhaps that is where the ancient idea of the coin of the realm becomes relevant again. The Roman emperor put his face on silver. The British monarch guaranteed the sovereign. America eventually put the credibility of the United States behind the dollar. The postwar world placed that dollar at the center of international finance. And the digital age may eventually ask a very different question:
What is powering the money itself?
FTG proposes the answer.
ELECTRICITY
Not an abstract promise. Not merely a piece of paper. Not a digital token whose value exists solely because another buyer might pay more for it. A defined unit of something measurable, useful and indispensable to modern civilization:
10 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
The next great chapter in the history of money will not be written on paper or stamped into metal.
It will be measured in kilowatt-hours.
And when that happens, the “coin of the realm” may ultimately become something far more fundamental than a coin.
IT WILL BECOME ENERGY ITSELF.
What's powering YOUR Money?™