CBERWhat the physics says
This idea does not come out of nowhere. It leans on physics that has stood for two centuries, on what we know about how large systems behave, and on money experiments that have been run before. Here is exactly what it rests on.
To head off a misunderstanding: these sciences do not prove the model. They supply the rules it has to fit inside. Formulas are there to work out what happens when you turn something, not to prove that the thing is right.
Relation to Thermodynamics
Energy does not appear out of nothing: coins can only be added when electricity is added. Every conversion costs usefulness, so we measure the reserve in usable energy, not in energy full stop.
In detail
Thermodynamics describes what happens to energy when you convert it. Two of its rules decide this entire design.
Energy does not appear out of nothing. It only changes form. That is the first law, and no exception to it has ever been found. That is precisely the property we copy into the money: coins can only be added when electricity is added. What nature does not allow, the currency does not allow either.
Every conversion costs usefulness. The energy stays, but you can do less and less with it. A bath of lukewarm water holds plenty of energy and still drives nothing. Electricity sits at the other end of that range: it is almost entirely usable. That is why we measure the reserve in exergy, the part you can still put to work, and not in energy full stop. Otherwise you could pump up the meter with a bucket of lukewarm water.
From physics to a meter reading
- The reserve is the lower of the current charge and the battery capacity after wear and cold.
- Only what is left after charging and discharging losses, measured at the grid connection, becomes money.
- Every month the books are physically recalibrated; three deviations in a row in the same direction sets off the alarm.
- Energy is not power: a second live number shows the power guaranteed callable now, under the coldest conditions.
- The higher a dot below, the less loss; the further right, the longer the storage lasts.
In detail
Two fine laws are worth nothing if they never reach the meter. This is the chain from battery to bookkeeping, and it has grown considerably stricter over the course of the design.
The reserve is not the size of the battery. What it says on the battery is a factory figure, and a factory figure is not backing. What counts is the minimum of two things: what is actually in there right now, and what that battery can still handle. The second is the factory size minus the wear the thing has picked up, and minus the correction for cold, because a cold battery gives up less than a warm one. The lower of those two is the reserve. So the same battery backs fewer coins in January after five years than it did new in June, and that is exactly the intention.
What goes in becomes money only after the losses are taken off. Charging costs electricity and discharging costs electricity. Coins are minted over what is left after those two losses, measured at one sealed boundary: the point where the storage hangs on the grid. Everything that disappears inside that boundary (inverters, cooling, self-discharge) is loss, and loss never becomes money.
Every month the books are recalibrated against reality. A running tally of what goes in and out always drifts away from what is really inside, given enough time. So the battery is physically measured at least monthly at a fixed calibration point, and the books are moved to that reading. The difference between the two is published, not tidied away. And three calibrations in a row deviating the same way sets off the alarm, however small the amounts: an error that keeps picking the same direction is not noise.
And energy is not power. A battery with 100 kWh in it does not hand that over in one second. Kilowatt-hours say how much is there, kilowatts say how fast it can come out. So next to the backing ratio there is a second live number: how much power is guaranteed to be callable at once right now. That number is determined at the cold winter temperature of the site itself, so under the conditions where it disappoints rather than the conditions where it flatters.
How to read the landscape below: the higher a dot, the less loss along the way; the further to the right, the longer the storage lasts. The top-right corner (efficient and seasonal) is the dream, and it is still empty: exactly the breakthrough that the reserve immediately rewards in money.
The grid as a shared pond
Core ConceptMulti-Vector Energy Integration (Exergy Equivalent)
Universal Energy Standard☀️ 💨 Solar & Wind (Direct Grid)
Direct 1:1Direct electrical injection into the grid. 1 kWh of generated electricity yields exactly 1 CBER.
Storing energy
Interactive MapChoose a technology. Compare how much energy returns and how long it can be stored.
Bar: efficiency. Caption: storage duration. Indicative values.
Lithium-ion
High EfficiencyIdeal for fast grid balancing and home batteries. High efficiency (90%), but suffers from degradation and short duration.
Systems Theory and Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS)
The economy is a complex adaptive system: you cannot steer it from above, at most you set the rules within which it settles the right way on its own. Feedback here reaches the user immediately and in the open, and the satellites mean there is no central point where everything fails at once.
In detail
The economy is not a static machine. It is a network of actors, citizens, companies and machines, that keep reacting to one another and adapting: a complex adaptive system.
Two principles keep such a network standing, and CBER builds on both.
Feedback that arrives immediately. In today's money system, the feedback loops are slow and indirect. CBER puts them in the open and in real time: the backing ratio and the network losses go straight back to the users. Push electricity over a long distance and the losses go up, so the transaction cost goes up with them. The system therefore has a standing reason to reorganise locally.
Satellites, so nothing is one big block. The CBER network is a federation of autonomous units, the satellites. If a national network or a central bank falls over, neighbourhoods and provinces keep running on their own reserves and their own meters. There is no single point where the whole thing can crash at once.
Information Theory
Money is information: a set of books recording who holds a claim on what. Here, that information stays pinned to matter, because the ledger has to stay in step with the physical reserve. Outsiders can verify the system numbers, though at field-test scale that runs through an auditor and witnesses rather than directly.
In detail
In information theory, information is whatever reduces uncertainty. By that measure money is pure information: a set of books recording who holds which claims on the real economy.
CBER ties that information to physics.
Bits pinned to matter. In a digital bank the information floats free of any physical carrier: a balance is a number, and a number can be doubled without costing a joule. CBER demands that the open ledger stays in step with the physical state of the reserve, measured in exergy.
Verifiable, and honest about where that verification stops. Cryptographic identities, sealed sensor streams and a public ledger make the system numbers verifiable by outsiders. Two things come with that. The reserve you see is rounded downward to a grain published in advance, which sits between half of its own measurement uncertainty and that uncertainty itself; the bank computes internally on the unrounded figure, no rule whatever runs on the displayed number, and it publishes alongside how large that gap is on average. And at field-test scale an ordinary member cannot check the sum themselves, because the series you would need point at individual people. What survives is this: every number a rule is settled on goes signed to the auditor and the witnesses every interval. The bank holds nothing back that nobody sees; at most it holds something back that not everybody sees.
Economic History
- Frederick Soddy (1926) wanted money backed by something physical, against debt that grows exponentially while wealth wears out.
- The Technocracy Movement (1930s) wanted to replace the dollar with energy certificates, based on a continent's energy capacity.
In detail
CBER is not the first proposal to tie money to energy. Two attempts came before it.
- Frederick Soddy (1926): in Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt, the Nobel laureate in chemistry laid out the basic flaw of modern banking. Financial claims grow exponentially through interest, while the real wealth that has to be bought with them wears out and degrades under the laws of thermodynamics. The claims run ahead of the goods. Soddy wanted money backed by something physical.
- Technocracy Movement (1930s): during the Great Depression this movement proposed swapping the dollar for "energy certificates". Wealth would be measured and handed out on the basis of the total energy capacity of a continent.
Why Previous Proposals Failed
Earlier energy money ran aground on one question: which energy counts? Throw heat, chemical energy and electricity onto one pile and the unit of account stops holding still.
CBER answers that question with exergy as the yardstick and electricity as the primary physical reserve. Electricity is also where our trust already sits: communication, payments, logistics and healthcare all run on power. CBER only writes down a dependence that is already there.