Schrödinger’s box, CBDCs, and stablecoins

This begins with a cat in a box and ends at your bank account. The physics is a short detour, and it explains why the most important money decisions have to be made before the outcome is known.

In 1935 the physicist Erwin Schrödinger asked us to picture a cat sealed in a box with a hidden mechanism that may or may not have killed it. He built the scene as satire, to challenge a claim in the physics of the day that he found absurd. The prevailing theory held that until someone opens the box and looks, the atom inside, and with it the cat, is suspended in a blur of contradictory states, alive and dead at once, in what is called superposition.¹

Already decided

Schrödinger meant this to expose a flaw in the theory. He was not thinking about your money. Modern physics later cleared up one detail that matters here. The cat is never really caught between alive and dead, waiting on someone to look. The atom inside cannot stay sealed off from everything around it; it brushes against the detector beside it, and that contact alone is enough to fix the outcome. The hammer falls or it does not, and the cat is alive or dead. Physicists call that moment decoherence. All of this happens while the box is still shut, hours before the scientist arrives. The lid, when it finally lifts, only shows what was already true long before.

Now it is your money

Put digital currency in the box where the cat was. It comes in two forms. A stablecoin, issued privately and pegged to a national currency, shows the mechanics today; its issuers already freeze and blacklist wallets at the request of law enforcement.² A central bank digital currency, or CBDC, goes further, rebuilding the base layer of money itself, so the box closes around the whole system in a single step. They share one trait above all, both are programmable by design.

What sits in superposition is how the power gets used. In one version it stays light. In the other it turns against the person holding it, and what you may do with your own money answers to discretionary rules you had no hand in writing, money that can be tracked, switched off by software, given an expiry date, or fenced to approved purchases. Both outcomes are live for now, which means your own wealth is at once safe and exposed. What can be done eventually gets done. To assume otherwise is to rest your wealth on the goodwill of whoever writes the updates.

The change will not announce itself. When this currency first arrives it will feel benign, even welcome; the card in your wallet works as it always has, the payment clears, and nothing looks different. That ease is deliberate. The first aim is adoption, to move a whole public off physical cash and out of the old financial system, and that takes trust, so the launch is made attractive and all but frictionless, with every reason to switch and nothing yet to fear. Whatever shifts will shift later, through a rule or an update you did not ask for, once cash is gone and the new rails are the only way to pay. We learn the answer only on the day the power is used, and by then it is too late to undo. For now the box is closed, and the uncertainty itself tempts us to wait, even to decide there is nothing to be done and take comfort that everyone will be in the same position.

The proof you are waiting for and the chance to act on it cannot coexist.

The trap is in the waiting

Money has its own moment of decoherence, the day a programmable currency is fully in place and enforced. The authority enforcing the rules is the environment striking the atom; the box seals for everyone at once, the rules harden into their final shape, and stepping outside is no longer possible. Your options are set then, whether or not you are watching, the way the cat is already alive or dead before anyone arrives to look. How restrictive it becomes is clear only after the time to act has run out.

This is a decision to make while the lid is still closed and the outcome still uncertain. Acting before you can be sure feels unreasonable, and every instinct argues for waiting until the box opens and then responding. Waiting for certainty is the trap. The proof you are waiting for and the chance to act on it cannot coexist; by the time the danger is beyond doubt, the door you would have used has already shut. It is the same instinct that once stopped a train on nothing more than suspicion, well before any proof. You act before certainty arrives, because the certainty you want comes only once it is useless.

What it looks like in practice

Deciding before the box opens means moving a portion of your wealth into allocated gold, held outside your jurisdiction. It is done in the calm, while the answer is still unknown and the move is still legally and technically open to you. It asks far less time than people imagine, and it carries no penalty for being early.

Gold would earn its place even if the box never opened. The research on allocation is consistent that a modest holding tends to lift returns and lower overall risk, which makes this two decisions in one. You were going to own the gold anyway. Holding it in your own name and beyond your jurisdiction costs nothing extra, and it closes off the risk this whole essay describes. The only question is where you keep it, inside the system or outside it.

If the uncertainty itself has been your reason to wait, turn that around. The uncertainty is the window, and it will not stay open forever. When you want to understand what acting would involve, I am a short conversation away.

Footnotes

1. Erwin Schrödinger set out the cat thought experiment in “Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik” (“The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics”), Naturwissenschaften, 1935. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/science/Schrodingers-cat ↩

2. Stablecoin issuers can freeze and blacklist holdings on request: Circle froze USDC tied to Tornado Cash after US sanctions in August 2022; Tether froze about US$344 million of USDt on the Tron network in April 2026. Source: CoinDesk, 24 April 2026, https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2026/04/24/tether-s-usd344-million-usdt-freeze-linked-to-u-s-economic-fury-against-iran-regime ; see also “Money with strings attached” on this site. ↩