---
title: "Part IV: Superscription"
part_of: "The Commanding Heights"
part_of_url: https://commanding-heights.com/commanding-heights.md
authors: ["Will Manidis", "Joe Roberts"]
date: 2026-10-29
url: https://commanding-heights.com/#part-iv
summary: "America’s greatest power in the age of intelligence will be the Dollar. Abundant models will manufacture near-unlimited demand for a newly global, stablecoin USD, the Neo-Dollar. Global participants replacing their local currency with Neo-Dollars would not have been banked in the USA, but indirectly hold Treasuries nonetheless. The American sovereign will use this new demand to help carry its costs through debasement, while the owners of these new economic channels will collect a toll that rises with inflation."
---

## Part IV: Superscription

> *America’s greatest power in the age of intelligence will be the Dollar. Abundant models will manufacture near-unlimited demand for a newly global, stablecoin USD, the Neo-Dollar. Global participants replacing their local currency with Neo-Dollars would not have been banked in the USA, but indirectly hold Treasuries nonetheless. The American sovereign will use this new demand to help carry its costs through debasement, while the owners of these new economic channels will collect a toll that rises with inflation.*

The powers of a modern state are terrible and glorious to behold. By any measure, the sovereign today is capable of calling upon cataclysms, by the press of a button or a phrase whispered over a secure line, which in days before would have required ritual sacrifice and incantation. It can send satellites upward and bring them hurtling back to Earth with orbital weaponry. It can engineer the weather and summon a deluge.[^85] The bomb dropped on Hiroshima had the explosive force of about fifteen thousand tons of TNT. Today, the American family atomics consist of 3,700 world-eaters sequestered in silent, lonely silos, awaiting the word to launch.[^86]

[^85]: U.S. Department of Defense, “DOD Succeeds in Intercepting Non-Functioning Satellite,” news release no. 0139-08, February 20, 2008. Foy D. Kohler to Dean Rusk, “Weather Modification in North Vietnam and Laos (Project Popeye),” January 13, 1967, in *Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968*, vol. 28, *Laos*, document 274.

[^86]: F. G. Gosling, *The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb* (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 1999), 51, 60n58. Hans M. Kristensen et al., “United States Nuclear Weapons, 2026,” *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists* 82, no. 2 (2026): 119–150.

The sovereign can see into the innermost hearts of men because most men surrender privacy for protection, becoming thralls bewildered by a spectacular arrangement, themselves indifferent to the order set by some other. All men want peace and safety and want for the one to guide them to it. We might add convenience to that list of desires. Data is a ledger of the activities of life, made possible by traces on the internet, the movement of persons carrying phones, pings and signals and digital trails excreted. All recorded. As those lives have been made increasingly legible and predictable, they will be seen and predicted. Aided by machines intelligent, knowledge without cost and invaluable, we will inch closer toward a more carefully orchestrated world where the latitude of individuals is both curtailed at the bottom and enhanced beyond the wildest nightmares and dreams at the top.

**But for the many eyes and destructive power the American sovereign wields, our most widely used weapon remains financial engineering.** The world contains many dollars and superintelligence will have them all.[^87] From glass towers in New York, lowering buckets into the yawning chasm, beyond reckoning, a pool deeper than it is wide and wider than it is deep: the American reserve of capital. More than anything else, it is the Neo-Dollar that will be both the means and end of American power in the world to come.

[^87]: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “Sometimes I wonder how many dollars there are in the world, because super intelligence seems to want them all,” X, October 17, 2026.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Christ went to Jerusalem, the Pharisees and Herodians put a question before him. The Pharisees, seeing Roman taxation as a reminder of their provincial status, opposed tribute to the occupiers. The Herodians, political allies and dependents upon the good will of the Empire, supported tribute. But for their differences, both were disturbed by Christ’s presence in the Holy City and wished to entrap him in a line of questioning. They came before Christ and asked him whether it was right to give tribute unto Caesar.

> *“But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites?*
>
> *Show me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny.*
>
> *And he said unto them, whose is this image and superscription?*
>
> *They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then said he unto them, render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”*[^88]

[^88]: Matthew 22:15–21 (King James Version).

The image may have changed, but the world is still beneath the yoke of superscription. We expect an ever-expanding Neo-Dollar, taking on new forms, seen and unseen. And whose superscription? The same as ever: the sovereign United States of America.

### The Neo-Dollar

The olden United States dollar is made from a blend of 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen, with tiny red and blue filaments woven in for security purposes. Each is about six by two inches. The face of the dollar is raised with intaglio printing. This banknote depicts a pyramid beneath the Eye of Providence and the ceremonially deist inscription *In God We Trust.*[^89] This banknote is not the dollar that we speak of.

[^89]: U.S. Currency Education Program, “$1 Note.”

The Neo-Dollar is the symbol, and the nuclear silos, exquisite weaponry stationed in spider holes across the world, are the referent. It does not exist, at least not as popularly conceived. It is an infinite sequence of ones and zeroes, a balance on electronic ledgers. Its movement is that of the derivative, the rate of change reduced in one account in Lahore and increased in Wilmington. When the Federal Reserve turns on the printing press, it runs a program to credit certain accounts.

It is this digital Neo-Dollar that will bring forth the diffusion of American intelligence. In this eventuality, it will do several things at once. It will become more necessary outside of the United States because access to the new productive forces of the American system will be priced through it. A symbol and a referent, as always. Even as the world indexes on Chinese machine intelligence, a foreign firm may still pay for the Chinese model in American dollars. For all the challenges to the prior American financial-intelligence arrangement, we expect the dollar to remain central.

At the same time that much of the world enters the Commanding Heights through the dollar, the reserve currency will lose purchasing power at home. This is the second purpose of the Neo-Dollar in its digital form. At a scale not yet seen, its superscription is being extended into every household larder and small business that can meet the minimum technological threshold of using it. This will be the external absorption of what began as a domestic monetary expansion. If people are worried about affordability today, they will be driven to madness in the near future when the price of intelligence hits a floor and the cost of everything else increases substantially.

The two functions of the dollar occur only as the American public balance sheet expands, and as it does, the foreign participant, witting or unwitting, will help absorb the claims. The sovereign will balance competing interests. A third-world end user can purchase the tokens generated by a Chinese model through an American router, and pay for it with a Neo-Dollar wallet. The resulting transaction will advance the sovereign’s currency objectives while drawing revenue away from the state’s native model offerings. Yet, even if sovereign objectives for commercial frontier revenue fall behind, cheaper intelligence, even Chinese intelligence, will expand the number of activities worth undertaking. All the way down the cost curve, American financial infrastructure will insert itself and serve irreplaceably, for a vigorish, of course.

One only need look back to the parable of the talents to understand that this changing relationship with the dollar has been a long time coming. In Matthew 25:14–30, Christ tells us of a master leaving on a journey who entrusts his wealth to his three servants. To one he gives five talents, to another two, and to the third one, just one, according to their abilities. The first two trade with what they receive and they double their wealth. The third digs a hole into the ground and hides his master’s money.

When the master returns, the third servant has lost nothing: “*And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine” (*Matt. 25:25).

*“Thou wicked and slothful servant.”* Even placing the money in a sweep account earning 1.6% APY would have been better.

You can invest the money, you can spend it, you can give it away. The only thing the Bible tells you that you cannot do is save it.

> *“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”*

*—Matt. 6:19–21*

Those who bear the primary losses will be those who try in vain to save. That inflexible multitude, locked into existing investment schemes or without the agency of wealth. We think primarily of the domestic savers in America, squirreling away folded banknotes under their mattresses or in checking accounts. Their cotton-linen dollar is the antique and valued as such. There too are those pensioners who bought the market, bought target-date funds, or even had the gall to leave their dollars and faith with an asset manager whose eye remains fixed on the ever-diminishing share of the economy that he is familiar with.

Most pitiable of all are the international participants in this new spectacle. Foreign retail, which was once separated by entire oceans, is now packed in close together and hope bundled into Western assets. You might not be able to see them, but they’re in the market just as much as you or me. Except, of course, that they lack the latitude afforded to Americans. For whatever bits they are able to put into American equities, their wages are paid in their home currency. They will be drawn in by the vast availability of American intelligence crossings, denominated in the invisible Neo-Dollar. They will be wretched at the hands of their denomination. Billions in a world yet to come. It is unavoidable.

The list of beneficiaries is much shorter. There will be those who anticipate the change and invest accordingly. They will accrue a marginal return. But there is a K-shape here, too. The bottom multitude could very well see a return, and their line may go up, too. But at the top of the K, their returns may be so large, pushing ever higher, that each side is not distinguished by whether they are in the black or in the red, but rather the relative rate of return. That true concentration of value will be for the owners of the Commanding Heights. The agglomeration of digital dollars traveling blindly from all corners of the earth before coming to rest on the books of a Delaware corporation.

### East/West of Eden

We think of the intelligence trade as an old quarrel between two coasts, elder and younger.

In America, the Elder Coast, East, understands that capital itself is not power. The leverage that it affords is limited. How many inventors have become fabulously rich off of an invention that they didn’t have the power to keep? We speak of money, but this is just a paper unit a few degrees removed from the dispensation of violence. The East understands the extra-economic foundations of capital. San Francisco, here representing the entirety of the frontier, has always been confused about this divide and has mistaken the size of its fortunes for power. Mistaking two complementary tools for substitutes is an error made only once and a mistake the frontier has always been allowed to make due to its location far away from the imperial core.

These are universal laws. It is a truth even more easily seen in China, which would never allow confusion about the supremacy of the party-state over the capital that it allows to grow. Honesty grows out of the lug of a bayonet. The most consequential cities in China are on the same coast, but they divide along the same lines as those coasts straddling the American continent. Shanghai, Fuzhou, Hangzhou, and others make the money and spectacular inventions. Beijing decides what they may do with their creations. Wealth and power. No one in Shanghai has any doubt about which city truly orders the affairs of the other when wills are tested.

The most famous test of this arrangement came in October of 2020. The richest man in China stood up at a conference on the Bund among the old bank buildings of the Shanghai waterfront and criticized their policy in polite terms. Shortly after, the initial public offering of his company, projected to be the largest in history, was canceled days before trading was due to begin. Within a year, his industry had given up more than $1T in market value and began announcing donations to common prosperity.[^90] There is a beauty found in the simplicity of the arrangement. The state before capital and the party before the state. None of it in question.

[^90]: Keith Zhai, Julie Zhu, and Cheng Leng, “How Billionaire Jack Ma Fell to Earth and Took Ant’s Mega IPO with Him,” *Reuters*, November 5, 2020. Charlie Campbell, “Why ‘Common Prosperity’ Has China’s Billionaires Running for Cover,” *Time*, September 8, 2021.

The second thing that the Elder Coast knows is that regulation is not truly found in statutes. It is the pleasure and permission of the sovereign. Words whispered in rooms that no reporter will ever attend. The form and function of power are increasingly disparate and can be understood not in the appearance but the consequence. West Coast companies might want greater clarity and advance notice of the vicissitudes of the sovereign: Facebook begging for regulation that would at least tell them what they are and are not supposed to do. But such clarity will not be found in the American near future. The arrangement between capital, technology, and the sovereign will be something inscrutable and only dimly understood by a few.

Beijing can be obvious about extracting wealth from its own because the party-state has never ceased to be the sovereign. It has long taxed Chinese people’s savings by suppressing the returns on bank deposits to subsidize the cost of borrowing.[^91] The proceeds are then used to build things, both physical and otherwise. When people are permitted to save, taxing their savings is the oldest trick in the sovereign’s book.

[^91]: Michael Pettis, “Who Paid for China’s Last Debt Cleanup, and Who Will Pay for the Next?,” *China Financial Markets*, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, August 25, 2026.

Washington can’t be as brazen because the median American voter’s retirement account is full of equities. A state takeover of the 401(k) would be obvious and unpopular. Instead, America taxes its own by eroding the purchasing power of its currency through inflation. Debasement taxes those holding the sovereign’s money and promises, fixed bond payments that buy less by the time they arrive, and subsidizes those holding assets whose nominal values can be marked to market. Debasement is the oldest trick in the issuer’s book, and how low-tax socialism pays its bills.

The US used to be quite good at hiding these extractions from view. It raised taxes and issued debt to pay for the Second World War, and later paid down that debt at rates of return below the rate of inflation.[^92]

[^92]: Carmen M. Reinhart and M. Belen Sbrancia, *The Liquidation of Government Debt*, IMF Working Paper 15/7 (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, January 2015), 30–35.

The US has one trick that Beijing would never permit: debasement at a global scale. The dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency allows Washington to debase its own currency and shift some of the costs to the rest of the world, billions who still use Neo-Dollars out of a sense of personal preference and familiarity.[^93] This is Washington’s ace, representing the reason why protecting America’s reserve-currency status will dictate how well America protects capital.

[^93]: Ricardo Correa et al., “Fifth Conference on the International Roles of the U.S. Dollar: Stablecoins, Digital Payments, and the International Role of the U.S. Dollar,” *FEDS Notes*, July 16, 2026. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and U.S. Secret Service, *The Use and Counterfeiting of United States Currency Abroad, Part 3* (September 2006), sec. 1.1.

But just as the United States retains unique advantages in the development of machine intelligence, it will also be subject to obstacles particular to its form of political organization. Ahead of time, would the American voting public have gone to the polls in support of the railroads? Likely not. Democracy, which we expect to remain a defining characteristic in the American development of machine intelligence, will assert itself in a multitude of ways. There will be efforts to protect against any mass labor displacement. They will likely be successful. There will be fear among the people’s representatives that will result in a more generous allowance. As the value of American citizenship grows, the willingness of the voting public to afford it to so many new entrants will shrink.

Perhaps most notable right now is that machine intelligence is facing scaling barriers as a result of a lack of public approval. The attitudes of the majority do not matter when conducting a training run. Nor when the technology at hand has not yet been raised to a matter of mass concern. Machine intelligence is far past that latter point. The first major technology since the atomic bomb that has prompted mass hopes and especially fears in a *different* future, this should have been expected. We live in an age where such a technological endeavor is a totalizing affair. People are well accustomed to the idea that a small invention can reshape or destroy the world.

The people and their representatives, especially local, are acting accordingly. America’s last scraps of federalism will enable the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, and many more like it, to stand in the way of machine intelligence reordering the physical world. The full exercise of sovereign power in America will need to overcome this arrangement, something that might seem strange to our Chinese counterparts. While they are familiar with demonstrations of localized interest, the supermanding interest of the sovereign is never in question.[^94]

[^94]: Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in *Bringing the State Back In*, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 12–13, 17–18.

![Black-and-white photograph of a packed high-school auditorium in Chatham, Virginia, where residents face the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors seated at a long table on the stage, April 15, 2025.](https://commanding-heights.com/img/pittsylvania-supervisors-2025.jpg)

*Pittsylvania County supervisors at Chatham High School, April 15, 2025. The board voted 6–1 to deny Balico’s proposed data-center campus and natural-gas power plant. Photograph: Appalachian Voices.*

Picture credit: Appalachian Voices, photograph of the Balico hearing, April 15, 2025, reproduced in Nicole Vaughan, “Data Center and Gas Plant Denied in Pittsylvania County,” Virginia Conservation Network, May 1, 2025.

This is not news. There’s a reason that a dam is called a bottleneck, and the reason that term has been imported into the inference stack. Physical infrastructure is expensive to build and monopolistic by nature, so whoever controls the switch also controls a tollbooth. This is also true of financial infrastructure, though the switchboard and tollbooths are less obvious.

Who controls those financial chokepoints, and how? In order to understand how to protect capital, one should start with how it’s been protected so far, which means understanding sovereign powers’ methods of taxation. What distinguishes one from another is what it takes, from whom, and whether the person being taken from is permitted to notice.

The healthcare workers’ union’s latest proposition-based extortion in California, a tax on billionaires’ net worth, is an example of a new and highly visible taking. At five percent it would be a stupendous one-time windfall, and the measure’s backward-looking residency test, which predates the measure’s public appearance on the ballot, suggests desperation.[^95] Whether it will pass is anybody’s guess, but it is clear that hundreds of billions of dollars have already left California,[^96] because unlike income and sales taxes, wealth taxes don’t work well in countries with open borders. Perhaps that’s why Sacramento is toying with the Sinomodern idea of closing them to the fleeing billionaires.

[^95]: California Legislative Analyst’s Office, “Proposition 40: Imposes One-Time Tax on Certain Taxpayers,” analysis for the November 3, 2026, election. SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, “Prop 40: The California Billionaire Tax Act,” accessed September 30, 2026.

[^96]: Benjamin Jaros et al., “The Net Present Value of the Billionaire Tax Act: An Assessment of the Fiscal Effects of California’s Proposed Wealth Tax,” Hoover Institution, March 4, 2026.

In the closed-capital-account regime that is currently enforced by Beijing, taxes on wealth are less problematic to administer, which is one reason for China’s suppression of returns on bank deposits. More important for our purposes is that both are very visible, which is why they are old hat. The truly successful taxes on wealth are invisible and difficult to identify with any perpetrator.

In the past, public rituals were necessary. In the spring of 1933, United States citizens were ordered to hand in their gold, and failure to do so came with a penalty of ten years in prison. Gold was the only exit from the currency for the common people, but President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to reverse the pervasive deflation that characterized the economy at the time. This required stopping drains on bank gold reserves. The program was successful. Within a year, the dollar had been devalued against gold by forty percent.[^97] It was a stunningly successful wealth tax, but one that likely would not have been possible under any other leader.

[^97]: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 6102, “Forbidding the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates,” April 5, 1933, secs. 2, 4, and 9. Gary Richardson, Alejandro Komai, and Michael Gou, “Gold Reserve Act of 1934,” *Federal Reserve History*, November 22, 2013.

![Black-and-white photograph of Franklin Roosevelt in a toga and laurel wreath, seated behind a tiered birthday cake among guests dressed as Romans: women in white robes and garlands, men in togas and helmets.](https://commanding-heights.com/img/roosevelt-birthday-toga.jpg)

*Franklin D. Roosevelt’s birthday toga party at the White House, January 30, 1934.*

Picture credit: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, [“FDR ‘Toga Party’ Birthday Celebration](https://fdr.blogs.archives.gov/2011/01/22/this-week-in-roosevelt-history-january-22-31/),” January 30, 1934, photograph NPx.47-96:1756.

The President who dressed up as Caesar on his first birthday in the White House, perhaps unsurprisingly, approached taxation and wealth redistribution like Caesar, too. Such similar concerns, inequality and debt and the legions. The Great Depression had already forced Hoover to raise the top bracket tax rate from 25% to 63% by 1932, but that was not enough for FDR. Prior to the war, he raised the top rate to 81%, and during the conflict, it rose to a peak of 94%.[^98] But well beyond a balanced budget, there were political questions driving FDR’s dispensation of sovereign power. While he was never successful, FDR at various points tried to institute a 100% tax on all net income over $25,000 a year, issuing an executive order and using the Treasury to pressure Congress to approve the regime. While he was fundamentally unsuccessful, his motivation was more a sovereign concern than one of revenue raising. In a statement criticizing a budget bill that removed his authority to impose a salary cap, FDR repeatedly returned to the injustice of drafting men for $600 a year while allowing those not serving to receive salaries he saw as too great.[^99] Fair treatment for his men-at-arms at the expense of the plebs and patricians. Would Caesar not be immediately sympathetic?

[^98]: U.S. Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, “U.S. Individual Income Tax: Tax Rates for Regular Tax: Highest Bracket,” series IITTRHB, FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed October 20, 2026.

[^99]: Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Statement Criticizing Legislative Riders,” April 11, 1943, The American Presidency Project, edited by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley.

FDR understood the state as a sovereign and acted accordingly. The circumstances in the U.S. are again calling for a sovereign, who will now have to act in a system where executive authority has been widely distributed and the overt display of sovereign power is both unnecessary and counterproductive.

Today, monetary policy in America is determined in a much more complicated way, involving both unelected public-facing officials and unelected private-sector actors. Neither group is likely to draw protests against taxation of the rich, but both are guilty of extracting wealth. Unlike the measure in California, you can’t opt out by logging your location and buying a house in Incline Village.

This is the secret to Washington’s taxation of wealth; not only is it difficult to protest because it’s difficult to point fingers, it’s invisible to the taxpayer. Unlike Beijing, it has no respect for capital controls, so it can tax your wealth whether you live in Los Angeles or New Jersey or New Hampshire. A much wider reach.

The power of Washington’s invisible wealth tax derives from issuing a global reserve currency, which extends its reach from California to Buenos Aires, where some designer keeps her savings in dollar tokens because quadruple-digit inflation has made her own currency untenable, and accepts them gladly from anyone who wants to exchange goods and services for them. The token itself pays no interest. Income on its reserves accrues to the issuer at market rates determined by Washington.[^100]

[^100]: Circle Internet Group, Inc., *Form 10-Q for the Quarter Ended June 30, 2026*, “Reserve Income.” Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, Pub. L. No. 119-27, §§ 4(a)(11), 20, 139 Stat. 419, 432, 466 (2025).

Protection against inflationary impulses in Washington depends upon repricing and replacement. As inflation causes receipts to rise, some businesses may not see costs rise equally, granting continued purchasing power to their managers. However, if another business must necessarily renew its expensive machinery every few years, it will find itself spending much of its increased top line just to keep the widget factory spinning. This is another reason to own a durable channel through which the economy must flow: its revenue can grow with the nominal value of its activity without requiring a matching capital investment.

### Constant Currency

We establish these dynamics to illustrate one of the primary rails of diffusion: the personal digital realm. The Neo-Dollar can look more peculiar still. What is to come will not appear strange or unusual to those who understand that what we now mean by dollar is little more than electrical currents, carried globally by undersea cables and rocketing from the orbital plane back to the dusty tracts they hover thousands of miles above. From the digital tutor in the third world to the third-world DoorDasher summoned in New York by call of the phone, the digital is the rail for the dollar to suffuse the world.

The owner is he who charges the toll. Much maligned, the subject of simultaneous envy and hatred by the wretched. He has entrenched himself in the center of commerce, himself a force of gravity drawing activity hither. The baron and his rails, the phone company and its digital marketplace. It’s the same story, again and again.

It’s a story you’ll be hearing much more of in the near future. The digital rails, which will become increasingly congested by the world that meets the minimum-entry condition of having a phone, will be owned by somebody and taxed accordingly.

We live in the age of nonterritorial empires whose subjects would not recognize each other as they jostle in the street, carrying no common allegiance nor banner. Not empires that anyone would die for, but countless lives will be peacefully expended in the furtherance of their designs. Cognizant or not, subjects all the same, and tax is owed.

The empire is embodied in activity and the means of conducting it. The terminal height will be a population-scale installed base, symbolic infrastructure previously only available to a state instantiated in code. The conquered population is the asset. The digital infrastructure is what allows the owner to financialize them. The owner will be model-agnostic and whatever enables the daily occurrences of activity within his domain will be sufficient for his purposes. The Neo-Dollar, now stranger than ever, will be the current underlying everything apps. Plural.

It will also continue to fuel the essential elements of the older economy: mining for resources, transnational shipping, the installation of power generation and transmission, bridges and tunnels. There is a Chinese element to the whole thing and we would not begrudge them credit for leading the way on digital suffusion. We expect novel conditions to originate in China, where a particular set of circumstances makes them feasible there before anywhere else.

But the rails of the global intelligence economy will remain American in one essential way: the dollar. We assume that a growing share of world activity runs on American intelligence and superscription. To the extent that substantial portions run on Chinese intelligence, open models in the invisible infrastructure, we still expect that the bill for a Chinese model can be settled in a dollar-backed stablecoin.[^101] Because the Chinese party-state will not relinquish its capital controls, it cannot permit the same freedom of circulation.[^102] Additionally, while five American hyperscalers own about 70% of global AI compute, Chinese firms account for only five percent, as of the end of 2025.[^103] For whatever the digital diffusion or product, and whether it runs on an American model or a Chinese model, inference will be necessary. And the primary providers at this scale will be American.

[^101]: OpenRouter, “Support,” under “What Payment Methods Are Accepted?,” and “DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731,” accessed September 30, 2026.

[^102]: People’s Bank of China et al., “关于进一步防范和处置虚拟货币等相关风险的通知” \[Notice on Further Preventing and Addressing Risks Related to Virtual Currencies and Other Matters\], Yin Fa \[2026\] no. 42, February 6, 2026, sec. I(1).

[^103]: Josh You and Venkat Somala, “Introducing the AI Chip Owners Explorer,” Epoch AI, April 6, 2026.

But intelligence alone is not enough. It must be diffused and it must be accounted for on a balance sheet. The balance sheet will be denominated in dollars. And the trade facilitated by that intelligence, a digital spectacle that makes itself visible only in the upheaval in the physical world, will be denominated in American dollars. What will be rendered unto us? What is the tool of the sovereign? It is of one superscription, many images. The dollar remains our most terrible tool, beloved and indispensable.