Digital USD – Do Not Accumulate

Part of Do Not Accumulate, a net.art series of imagined Central Bank Digital Currencies inscribed on Bitcoin. The Digital Dollar is a single, self-contained HTML banknote rebranded as a Federal Reserve-issued digital currency of the Surveillance States of America. Twenty-one editions exist, each programmed to lose value over a 21-month demurrage cycle.

Visual references. Drawn entirely in vector graphics, the bill subverts the design language of the real US $20. The Statue of Liberty stands where Andrew Jackson once posed. A small heraldic eagle perches atop a striped shield. The Federal Reserve seal (left) and the U.S. Treasury seal (right) read as two watchful eyes. The honeycomb guilloché, the security strip, the colour-shifting numeral, and the serial number all return as themselves, slightly off. TWENTY DIGITAL DOLLARS runs along the bottom, and a curatorial signature reads Unconstitutionally Signed by the U.S. Digital Currency Authority.

The propaganda machine. As each edition advances through its cycle, the bill becomes its own propaganda machine. System warnings, adjustment notices, and demurrage countdowns appear on the note, selling the controls they impose. The recurring line, “Identity verification helps ensure safe access for everyone,” recasts mandatory KYC as care, just as the imagined dollar recasts surveillance, spending limits, and the erosion of privacy as features and conveniences.

Architecture. The work lives on Bitcoin as a recursive ordinal. A four-layer architecture (a shared artist layer, shared assets, the Digital Dollar currency layer, and twenty-one individual edition inscriptions) reconstitutes each note on demand, fully on-chain, with no external dependencies. Cornerstone editions (1 and 21) are inscribed on rare satoshis whose blocks were mined on real US CBDC policy milestone dates: Project Hamilton (2020), the Federal Reserve’s Money and Payments paper (2022), and the White House Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets (2022). The substrate carries the policy timeline alongside its imagined consequences. The title encodes the rule: D.N.A. spells Do Not Accumulate, and demurrage is its inner code. A permanent medium records a currency built to expire.