Welcome to The Hard Money Project
The gateway to sovereignty for you and your community
We’re living through a historic moment! It might not seem that way because of the complexity of how things work, and the convenience of being digitally served in almost everything tends to obscure reality for most people. But here’s the thing: while the internet gave us systems and use cases that made the expression of ideas, communication, and value exchange easier and more efficient, it also brought an unprecedented centralization of power that a select few love to control.
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And you might ask: centralized power in what, exactly? The answer is: everything that gets digitized. Everything in the physical world, or even purely digital assets, can be represented through data packets that someone, somewhere, stores, some fiercely gatekeeps, sometimes programs, and often monetizes on your behalf. Now you understand why data is the most valuable commodity of the 21st century, right?
So here’s the real question: is there any digital asset out there that you actually control, and that society acknowledges as yours? Spoiler alert: not really. The harsh reality is that you don’t control any of your so-called “assets” online. Why? Because the internet protocols weren’t exactly built for ownership. Those digital blips that supposedly represent your assets and rights? They’re controlled by whoever runs the servers where all that data sits. The protocols of today’s web didn’t come with built-in property rights—there’s no inherent option to freely choose whether to truly own or manage your rights assigned to things or what belongs to you, or to delegate it to someone else.
This brings us to a constant battle between various players, each building walls to control those database ledgers where all that data, representing virtually every asset, resides. Yes, everything—starting with the data that defines our identity: official identity, monopolized by the State government where we hold citizenship. Then there is our social identity graph: data assets like messages, conversations, news, media we share with others, our search history—nearly every interaction is also monopolized by some Big Tech company. And don't forget our money and financial assets, from the simplest to the most exotic, controlled by the banks and financial firms where their representation resides. Even the goods and services we demand and consume—all the little mundane things of daily life—are tracked and controlled by some private entity that loves to use that data info to keep you buying from them and, if you’re not paying attention, sometimes even to exploit that information asymmetry.
But what does this have to do with money?
Money and the “Bretton Woods moment” of the digital era
Well, money is the symbol, institution, and asset that exerts the greatest power over everything else, programming and sitting in the middle of every exchange for valuable things that don’t necessarily come free in society. It’s the language of exchange. It seems to be about to undergo its greatest revolution in history—its total digital transformation. We are living through a “Bretton Woods1 moment” of the digital era, where the monetary system as we know it is about to change completely. This is where it becomes essential to educate yourself—for your own good, your freedom, and that of your loved ones.
You will have to decide what kind of money you want to use in the future. If money is going digital, you must ask yourself who will centralize its records (those data point bits that define it), control the regulations that shape its purchasing power, or even program it and your purchasing behavior, on your behalf—or whether there is a decentralized alternative that allows you to reclaim sovereignty, ownership and agency over the rights of what belongs to you.
On the one hand, electronic money has existed for years, transferred through messaging systems between central banks, banks and financial institutions. But the current momentum toward centralizing control over money on digital, programmable unified ledgers, controlled by governments and central banks, where ALL PAYMENTS settle, is entirely new. And that is, for sure, the first alternative we're heading toward.
THMP: an alternative monetary door to freedom of choice
So if we are in this ‘Bretton Woods moment’, watching as the global monetary system gets a full digital makeover. The question we all have to ask—well, ideally, we’d ask—could be this:
Should the redesign of money itself be the exclusive work and hobby of a few insiders behind closed doors, or should we, as a society, actually understand what’s happening? Because let’s be honest—given the stakes and the role money plays in society, shouldn’t we all have a say in how we want this to unfold and the freedom to choose our path forward?
Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Which brings us to the ‘Why’ behind The Hard Money Project (THMP). The idea here is threefold: first, it’s a platform where anyone can join the community, learn together, and critique—respectfully and constructively, of course—the very concepts shaping our monetary future, so you can make informed, wise choices.
Then there’s the goal of laying out some first principles to dissect what any monetary system actually stands for, the foundations it claims to uphold, the structure of its architecture, and why understanding this as deeply as possible matters in an institution so central to society.
And finally, once we’ve nailed down these basics, we can dive into the standard that The Hard Money Project proposes, from its design principles to the mechanisms built into each of its protocols.
At the core, it’s pretty simple: you should be free to make your own choices, and, naturally, own the responsibility that comes with them. But here’s the catch—you don’t get there without knowing something about what’s actually going on. And let’s be clear, this isn’t just an individual matter, but one for all of us as society.
The Bretton Woods Conference, held in July 1944, was a top-down closed-door gathering of 44 Allied national governments to establish a new international monetary system in the aftermath of World War II. The resulting Bretton Woods Agreement created a system of fixed exchange rates pegged to the U.S. dollar, which was convertible to gold at $35 per ounce. This conference cemented the U.S. dollar as the dominant global reserve currency, a phenomenon that persists to this day.