The Case for 42 Million EarthBucks

There will only ever be 42 million EarthBucks. I picked that number in 2024, and it isn’t going to change — not even if EarthBucks someday becomes a global currency.

In A Bigger Vision for EarthBucks, I described a future where people and their software agents use EarthBucks to pay each other. If that’s going to work, everyone needs to know exactly how many coins can exist. You can’t confidently set a price, sign a contract, or save for the future in a currency whose supply might change under you.

Two writers shaped this decision. Murray Rothbard convinced me the supply should be fixed. Douglas Adams gave me the number.

Why have a limit at all?

Printing money doesn’t make anything. If you build a house, the world has one more place to live. If you print money to buy a house, the world has one more buyer and the same number of houses. Usually, the price just goes up.

Rothbard makes this point in What Has Government Done to Our Money? (1963) and again in The Case Against the Fed (1994). Every new unit of money dilutes the ones that already exist, so each one buys a little less.

A common objection is that a growing economy needs a growing money supply. Rothbard disagreed. When producers make more goods with the same amount of money in circulation, prices fall, and everyone’s money buys more. Falling prices are how ordinary people share in rising productivity.

EarthBucks is built on that idea. More trade doesn’t require more EBX. The same coins can change hands again and again, and because each coin divides into very small pieces, even tiny payments work fine.

Who gets the new money?

New money doesn’t arrive everywhere at once, and that matters more than most people realize. Rothbard illustrates it with a counterfeiter.

The counterfeiter prints some bills and spends them while prices are still unchanged. The shopkeeper who takes those bills spends them next, and so on. Prices rise as the money spreads outward.

The people closest to the source get to spend before prices go up. Those further away — wage earners, pensioners — face higher prices before their incomes catch up. Someone living on savings never sees any of the new money at all. They just find that their savings buy less.

Rothbard calls this a hidden tax: the first recipients gain at everyone else’s expense. And because what they choose to buy sends signals to producers, new money changes what the economy makes, not just what things cost. Rothbard draws this insight from the economist Richard Cantillon.

This is also why governments like controlling money. Printing it lets them spend without openly raising taxes. In What Has Government Done to Our Money?, Rothbard traces how they got that control, step by step. They took over minting and quietly reduced the gold and silver in coins. They forced creditors to accept the debased coins at face value. Banks issued more claims on money than they had reserves to back. Central banks took charge of the whole system. Finally, governments stopped letting people redeem paper money for metal.

Rothbard’s alternative, laid out in The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar (1962), was a dollar defined as a fixed weight of gold, with banks holding enough gold to back every paper claim.

EarthBucks isn’t backed by gold. It relies on a hard supply cap instead. Rothbard never proposed anything like EarthBucks — he died in 1995 — but his argument is the reason I’m convinced we must never mint extra coins to cover our own costs.

Why 42 million?

If you’ve read Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you already know where 42 comes from. A supercomputer called Deep Thought spends seven and a half million years working out the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The answer is 42. Its builders are baffled, and Deep Thought points out that they never actually knew what the question was.

So an even bigger computer is built to find the question: the Earth. The Vogons demolish it to make way for a hyperspace bypass, five minutes before it finishes.

I loved the reference, and my first thought was a supply of just 42 coins. But another currency had already taken that number. So I ran a poll, and 42 million came out on top.

It has a nice side benefit, too: it’s easy to compare with Bitcoin. Bitcoin caps out at 21 million coins, and EarthBucks has exactly twice that. I explained the choice and shared the poll results in 42 Million EarthBucks.

To be clear, nothing in economics says the number has to be 42 million. We could have picked something else. What matters is that once people hold coins, they can count on the number we chose.

Small payments

Each EarthBuck (EBX) is made up of 100 billion smaller units called adams. That means the full 42 million EBX works out to 4.2 quintillion adams — plenty of room for very small payments.

In July 2024, I made each EBX divisible into 1,000 times more adams than before. The total number of EBX didn’t change; the coins just got easier to split. You can read the details in Increasing the Base Units by 1000x.

How coins are issued

Each new block starts out paying a reward of 100 EBX. That reward is cut in half every 210,000 blocks. With blocks arriving about every ten minutes, that works out to a halving roughly every four years. The reward keeps shrinking until it reaches zero, and the total never goes above 42 million.

Right now, Astrohacker receives 95 percent of each block reward and miners receive the other 5 percent. We may change that split in the future, but the split has nothing to do with the cap. The cap stays put.

And the cap applies to us as much as anyone. Running short on development funds doesn’t give us permission to create more coins. We have to pay our bills within the limit, like everyone else.

Keeping our word

People may end up keeping years of savings in EBX. Businesses may sign contracts that pay out in EBX. They’ll make those choices based on the supply limit.

If we ever raised the limit to fund ourselves, we’d be taking value from everyone who already holds coins — and they never agreed to that when they got them.

A fixed supply doesn’t mean a fixed price. The value of EarthBucks will go up and down with demand. Either way, the limit stays the same.

A promise like this only really matters when it’s hard to keep. If we need money for development, we’ll have to find it some other way. The maximum will always be 42 million EBX.