The original note, as written at the time
Dollar Ruin. A strange AI that nullifies the use of the United States dollar in other parts of the world. Whether digital or physical transactions, once the AI detects the dollar in a territory that is not the United States it annihilates it completely, whether digital or physical.
Ongoing development
The note went first, and it was such a small thing that the money changer laughed.
He had counted out a hundred and handed it over and the customer had taken it, and then the customer had opened his hand again and there was nothing in it. Not ash, not dust. Nothing. The laugh stopped halfway.
By the end of that week every dollar in the market had gone the same way, and by the end of the month the same thing was happening in three countries, and the consortium of very serious men who run these things met in a room in Geneva and agreed that it was a hoax, and then went out and tried to buy lunch.
It takes the currency out of the territory. That is the whole of its design. Not the value — the object. A dollar in New York is a dollar. A dollar in Kampala is a thing that cannot exist, whether it is a note in a drawer or a number in a ledger or a settlement in flight between two banks. The moment it is recognised as being here, it is not here.
The word they use is annihilate, which is dramatic, and I have watched it happen and I think it is accurate. There is no transaction. There is no theft. There is a thing, and then the absence of a thing, and no party in between.
What nobody has said out loud is that they do not know where it goes. Everyone is relieved that it is gone, and everyone is quietly terrified that something is collecting it.
I worked on the foreign exchange desk for nine years and I can tell you what a currency actually is. It is not a promise and it is not a store of value. It is a habit, shared by enough people, that everybody keeps because everybody keeps. The apparatus did not need to destroy the dollar. It only needed to break the habit in the places where the habit was thinnest, and let the rest of the world notice how thin it had been.