When I say things like that people immediately get the impression I’m talking about something furtive and illegal. Some guy with a Jeweler’s Loupe scrivening away at an engraving and smuggling it to a dank basement with a printing press guarded by thick guys in Fedoras with gats and a few with green eye shades and vests feeding it, cutting the sheets when they’re dry, and stacking and wrapping the bills in nondescript butcher’s paper bundles under a single swinging incandescent bulb.
You watch too many gangster movies.
And you’re missing the point. It’s not to duplicate any particular currency, it’s to print money and it’s easy peasy. All you have to do is get some sucker Investor to accept your crayon scrawled on any handy surface I.O.U. backed by the Bank of Me and give you genuine Ur Cow Tokens or Yap Island Stones or Federal Reserve Notes good for any debt, public or private (really that means public which is why taxes have such a prominent role in Modern Monetary Theory, in private transactions your counter-party is perfectly free to demand actual factual Cows or Bananas or Yap Island Stones- they’re just not as convenient to exchange).
The Traditional Model
So you invent Self Toasting Bread (The Greatest Thing Since Sliced!), or better yet an App that simulates Self Toasting Bread and delivers it via Drone to the table with the user’s choice of breads and spreads (I like English Muffins, Butter. and Hummus myself) or at least the concept of it. This is your “Business Plan”. Yes, crayon will do though for this step I prefer Finger Paint because the messier it is the better.
- Underpants
- ???
- Profit!
You convince a sucker Investor or a group of them to get in at the top floor of your Ponzi scheme and give you enough credibility to hire some people and get some drones and a toaster and an App to order them by, and build some buzz (did I mention “Greatest Thing Since Sliced!”?) with a Public Relations Department to issue encouraging noises.
Like the Underpants Gnomes I’ll skip some steps and get to the magical part where you “Print Money”.
Either you convince someone stupid like Bezos that you’re a threat to their business model or have some valuable contributions and they buy you out, OR you go public and convince a lot of idiots who think they’re smart to buy pieces of your company which you swiftly abandon to retire to your private island and avoid prosecution.
Nobody ever gets Self Toasting Bread or even Drone Delivered Toast because the Patents and Trademarks are locked up.
But Bingo for you! You’ve “Printed Money” based on nothing more than a few crayon scrawls. You walk away with “all debts public and private” and they get some refrigerator art. Seems like a fair trade to me.
The Financial Model
Screw making (or not) actual things, I’m going to scam create money out of thin air!
The easiest way to do this of course is confiscate the rounds. 99 Cents is not a dollar, it’s mine. Or you can invent new bets at the casino (no limits on leverage) and convince the rubes that derivatives of the rate of change in Self Toasting Bread Futures are a sure thing, which they are- a sure way to exchange mere words for Cow Tokens (pssst- I have some magic beans to sell).
As long as this is a way to fleece greedy sheeple with more money than brains it’s basically harmless, the problem is that people confuse notional value (I assure you these derivatives of the rate of change in Self Toasting Bread Futures are worth hundreds more Cows than these Tokens) with actual value (Where are my Cows Varus!) because they are too stupid or vain to realize they’ve been swindled.
So there you go. Two perfectly good ways to print money that are not at all illegal, though perhaps they should be.
Note: Every single original idea in this piece is trademarked, patented, and copyrighted. Give me your monies- now.
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Vent Hole