[A picture of two doors, one that says “$2 billion immediately” in red. The other says “$1 that doubles everyday”]
I chose the green door ninety-three days ago.
At the time, it seemed obviously correct. Not even a close call. The red door offered two billion dollars immediately—a sum so large it would solve every material problem I’d ever face, fund any project I could imagine, and still leave enough to give away amounts that would meaningfully change thousands of lives. But two billion is a number. It has a fixed relationship to the economy, to the things money can buy, to the world.
The green door offered one dollar that doubles every day.
I remember standing there, doing the mental math. Day 30: about a billion dollars. Day 40: over a trillion. Day 50: a quadrillion. The red door would be surpassed before the first month ended, and after that, the gap would grow incomprehensibly fast. Choosing the red door would be like choosing a ham sandwich over a genie’s lamp because you were hungry right now.
So I walked through the green door.
The first few weeks were unremarkable. I had a dollar, then two, then four. A week later I had $64, which felt like finding money in an old jacket. By day twenty I had over a million, and I started getting calls from financial advisors I’d never contacted. By day thirty-one I had crossed the two-billion threshold—officially richer than I would have been behind the red door.
I didn’t understand the problem until day forty-four.
The money, you see, had to exist somewhere. Not philosophically—I mean physically. Digitally. When I checked my bank balance, a computer somewhere had to store that number. And storing the number 2^n requires n bits.
One bit per day. That’s it. That’s the rate at which my fortune’s representation grows. A linear function. Almost comically modest.
But here’s what I’d failed to understand about exponential growth: the value doesn’t care about the representation. The bits grow linearly. The dollars they encode grow exponentially. And dollars make claims on the physical world.
Day forty-four. My balance: 2^44. 17 trillion dollars. A measly sixth of global GDP. The number itself required only 44 bits to store—about 6 letters of text, trivially small from an information-theoretic perspective.
But money is not information. Money is a claim.
The Treasury Department called on day forty-four.
$17 trillion has a specific significance: it’s roughly the M2 money supply of the United States. All the cash, checking deposits, savings accounts, money market funds—everything Americans think of as “money”—adds up to about that much. I now held more than that. In a single account. Attached to a single person.
The man on the phone was very polite. He explained that they weren’t accusing me of anything. They understood this wasn’t counterfeiting, wasn’t fraud, wasn’t any crime they had a name for. He said that for a time they had entertained that hypothesis, but—a note of fear entered his voice—it had been falsified. Now they had other questions. Macroeconomic questions. The kind of questions that, he implied, it would be better for everyone if we discussed in person.
I flew to Washington the next morning. Day forty-five. My balance: $35 trillion. Global GDP is about $100 trillion. I was now worth a third of annual planetary economic output, and by the time my return flight landed, I’d be worth two-thirds.
The meeting was in a room with no windows. There were people from Treasury, the Fed, someone from the Bank for Internal Settlements, and three others who didn’t introduce themselves or their agencies. They were not hostile. But they weren’t friendly either.
“You have to understand our position,” said a woman from the Fed. “You could, at any moment, attempt to purchase anything. Any asset, any commodity, any company. Markets cannot function when a single actor holds infinite potential demand.”
“But I’m not trying to buy anything,” I said. “I don’t want to crash the economy. I just want—” I paused. What did I want? I’d never actually thought about it. The green door had seemed so obviously correct that I’d never considered what I’d do after walking through it.
“It doesn’t matter what you want,” she said. “It matters what you could do. Every market in the world now has to price in the possibility that you wake up tomorrow and decide to corner it. Do you understand? The existence of your account is a systemic risk.”
“And if I don’t agree?” I asked.
One of the men at the back of the room coughed meaningfully. Point taken.
Day forty-seven. $140 trillion. Congress passed the Emergency Monetary Stabilization Act in a rare unanimous vote. The key provision: the federal government would purchase my doubling dollar at fair market value.
I want to be clear about something. They didn’t seize it. They didn’t nationalize my account or invoke eminent domain or declare me an enemy combatant. That would have been simpler, legally cleaner, and probably would have survived constitutional challenge given the circumstances. But I am genuinely unsure if they could have. Don’t screw with a magical dollar. Instead, they bought it. Fair market value. Which, since fair market value was “functionally infinite,” they paid me by issuing a new class of Treasury instrument that would mature in ten thousand years at a value pegged to whatever my dollar would have been worth by then. They paid me $100 million. I pushed for $2 billion but they said I should have walked through the other door.
The math doesn’t work. I know the math doesn’t work. I have a piece of paper that entitles me to a number that could not be written down using all the atoms in the observable universe as ink. The Treasury Department knows this too. Everyone knows this. We performed a legal ritual to transfer ownership of something that had become, in some fundamental sense, ontologically unsafe for a private citizen to possess.
I signed the papers two days later. My balance at transfer: $562 trillion. Enough to buy every asset on Earth and have most of it left over.
Today is day ninety-three. My dollar—the dollar that was mine—is now worth 2^93 dollars. About 10 octillion. If you wrote it out, it would be a one followed by twenty-eight zeros. The global GDP, by comparison, is a one followed by fourteen zeros. My former dollar could purchase the entire world economy about a trillion times over.
Sometimes I wonder what happens on day 200. Or day 300. Or day 1,000. At some point, doesn’t the number become larger than any physical quantity? Larger than the number of atoms in the solar system, then the galaxy, then the observable universe? What is a dollar worth when it could theoretically purchase more matter than exists?
The economists I’ve talked to—and I’ve talked to many, since I’m something of a minor celebrity in certain academic circles, not to mention conspiracist ones—say this is the wrong way to think about it. Money is a social technology, they remind me. It only has meaning within a network of agreements and expectations. A dollar that claims more than reality can provide simply... stops meaning anything. It becomes a very large number attached to the word “dollars” in the same way that “one million happiness points” is a very large number attached to the word “happiness.”
But that’s not quite right either. Because the dollar is still there. Still doubling. Still, in some sense, valid. The government accepted it as legal tender. And I very much doubt they are gonna send it into space. So it’s sat there, doubling, waiting. For what?
By Magnus Hambleton, Claude Opus 4.5 and me1.
Most of the words in this story were written by AI. Inspired by a viral tweet (the image), Magnus prompted Claude Opus 4.5 to write the first version which got 6 million views on twitter. I then made some edits, which make it a less pure artifact, but in my view a better story.
Magnus is very humble but I think that most of the work here is in noticing the possibility for a story and then prompting it well. Here is his prompt:
Can you write a 1000 word short story in the style of slatestarcodex/scott alexander or jack clark/import AI about a world in which the dollar doubles every day, and the horrifying implications. Eg implications of storing the bits of the dollar value in bank systems, and how the economy is affected by all this money being created. Write it from the perspective of the one who made the choice.
He then added this in response to what he received:
make it mathematically accurate, i.e. bits to store the monetary value will scale linearly with number of days, since it’s doubling and bits also increase the number they can represent by 2^x
Finally, I think the quality of Opus 4.5’s writing is solid and the solutions it comes up with are good. I didn’t ask for the specific solution of a bond pegged to future value, it generated that (as it generated all but about four sentences of text). Claude 4.5 is a useful tool for me in writing fiction.
But anyway, I’m not sharing this just because it’s AI. I also liked it as a story. Please judge it based on that.
Magnus showed Claude the response to the original story. Here is its response:
