POW-2: Digital Dollars Now with Expiry Feature confronts the silent encroachment of centralized digital currencies. As central banks worldwide accelerate plans for state-issued digital money, the public risks sleepwalking into a future where financial autonomy is eroded. Expiring funds, vendor blacklists, remote invalidation — tools that were once the stuff of dystopias are now viable policy levers. The European Unions’ long experiment with negative interest rates offered a glimpse of this power in action.
Currency’s original purpose as a store of value — already compromised by systemic inflation — now risks descending into a tool for behavioral manipulation. The artwork visualizes this concern through an installation of four notebooks whose 8,640 individually hand-stamped marks form a pixelated dollar coin dissolving into a cloud. In the lower left, Lady Liberty appears in disbelief and despair, her hands raised to her head, mourning the erosion of a once hard and free currency.
The Proof of Work series (POW) functions conceptually as a blockchain. Each notebook acts as a ledger, every page as a block, and each rubber stamp — marked by dust, pressure, and paper absorption — is as uniquely identifiable as a cryptographic hash.
POW-2: Digital Dollars Now with Expiry Feature is currently on display at the Bitcoin Museum in Nashville, TN.
