Strings attached

There is a gift card in a drawer in your house. You know the one. It works at a single store, it may carry an expiry date, and somewhere in the fine print there was a fee for letting it sit too long. You accepted all of that without a second thought when you received it. Of course you did. It was a small slice of money with rules attached, and every other dollar you owned was free to go where you pleased.

We are comfortable with money that comes with strings. Air miles that expire. Loyalty points good only at one chain. Store credit you can spend here and nowhere else. A voucher that must be used by Friday. None of it troubles us, because it sits at the edges of our financial life. The center, the actual money in the actual account, has always answered to us and to no one else.

Examine that assumption, because it is being engineered away, deliberately and unseen.

The two doors

A digital currency is money issued and held as software, a balance defined by code rather than by paper notes or a deposit you could withdraw in cash. It is reaching ordinary use through two doors. Their names differ; their foundation is the same.

The first is a central bank digital currency, a CBDC. It is a country’s own money issued directly, in digital form, by its central bank. The sovereign currency itself, held as code. Most of the world’s central banks are now researching or piloting one, a rollout you can follow country by country. Canada is an instructive case. It studied a retail CBDC, then paused the project in September 2024. The Bank of Canada cited other priorities. Its own research had also found that the public balked, uneasy about a currency the state issued directly and could watch and switch off.¹

The second door drew less resistance. A stablecoin is a digital token issued by a private company and pegged 1:1 to a national currency, a digital dollar on the same rails. In November 2025 Canada introduced a Stablecoin Act, and it became law on March 26, 2026, placing these issuers under the Bank of Canada.² The same government that had stepped back from issuing digital money directly had, within 18 months, written the rules for a private version of it. Few people registered the two as cut from the same cloth. They are. The largest issuers can already freeze a holding, address by address, when an authority asks, and have done so many times.³ How stablecoins work, and what their conditions can do, is the subject of a separate piece. For now, the door is open.

Money you hold outright answers to you. Conditional money answers to whoever wrote the conditions.

Both run as software, which can carry instructions. The same rails that let a government deliver a relief payment to millions in an afternoon can also set what a given unit may be spent on, by whom, and by when. These capabilities already exist; they are what programmable money is, a gift card’s rules raised to the level of the currency itself. The technology is here. The open question is what shape it takes, and who holds the controls.

Yours to hold, theirs to rule

Money you hold outright answers to you. Conditional money answers to whoever wrote the conditions. Until now the conditional kind has been a sliver at the edges, and its strings never stung, because the money that mattered stayed wholly yours. Programmable money erases that line. The balance can read the same while the rules around it belong to someone else, a spending category switched off, a transfer that needs permission, a unit that expires to push you to spend it. Money built to lose value if you hold it is not a new idea. It is a very old one, tried and abandoned, that until now had no way to impose itself on everyone at once.⁴ China’s central bank has already trialed exactly this, handing citizens in Shenzhen digital cash that was programmed to expire if it went unspent by a set date.⁵ Used well, these powers could be benign, even useful. Once a capability is built into the money everyone uses, though, it stays available to whoever holds power next. Its restraint depends on who that turns out to be, and that can change with an emergency, or a policy you never voted on. By the time the conditions are visible, the money that carries them is already the money in your account.

The reason can be anything

You might assume such powers would only ever be aimed at criminals and fraud, the people no one rushes to defend. A condition written into money answers to no particular reason; the code does not know or care why a rule exists. The same mechanism that blocks a stolen unit can, with a change of policy and no new technology, be turned on what you buy, what you have said in public, where you gave your support, or a view you hold that is out of favour this year. We have already watched ordinary citizens in a stable Western democracy have their accounts frozen over a political donation.⁶ That required no programmable money. It would be faster and far less visible with it.

Once money can be made conditional, the grounds for a condition become a matter of policy. The line between an acceptable use and an unacceptable one moves to wherever the party holding the controls places it, without warning and without your consent.

A sliver, in reverse

None of this calls for alarm, at least not yet. The money is turning programmable, and a rule written into it can serve whatever purpose its holder chooses. Most of it will arrive slowly, wrapped in convenience, and much of it will be mundane. The sensible response is to keep a portion of your wealth in the one form that takes no instructions from anyone, a real asset, held in your own name, in a private vault outside the system that issues it. Gold does not expire, and no update can switch it off. It answers to no policy.

The gift card never bothered you because it was a sliver of your money, and everything else moved without restriction. The discipline now is the mirror image of that, to make sure a meaningful sliver of your wealth stays the opposite of programmable, money with no strings at all, while arranging it is still your choice. When you want to put a portion of it beyond those rules, I will show you how.

Footnotes

1. Bank of Canada paused its retail CBDC project in September 2024, citing other priorities and little public appetite. CoinDesk, 23 Sept 2024. ↩

2. Canada’s Stablecoin Act (within Bill C-15) received Royal Assent on 26 March 2026, giving the Bank of Canada supervision of stablecoin issuers; in force expected around 2027. Fasken. ↩

3. Stablecoin issuers can freeze holdings address by address, and have: in April 2026 Tether froze about US$344 million of USDt across two Tron addresses linked to Iran’s central bank. CoinDesk, 24 Apr 2026. ↩

4. Money engineered to lose value when held is an old idea: Silvio Gesell’s “stamped” decaying currency, run in Wörgl, Austria, in 1932-33 until the central bank stopped it. Blanc, “Free Money for Social Progress” (1998); see “The money that rusts” on this site. ↩

5. Shenzhen (Luohu district) pilot, October 2020: the People’s Bank of China distributed digital yuan by lottery that expired if unspent by a set date, a real instance of programmed expiry. Peterson Institute; JRFM (2025). ↩

6. February 2022: under the Emergencies Act, Canada directed banks to freeze accounts tied to the convoy protests without a court order; the Federal Court later ruled the invocation unlawful (Jan 2024), upheld on appeal (2026 FCA 6). Federal Court of Appeal. See The week the cards stopped working on this site. ↩