Every comparison of money you have ever read was decided before it started.
Not dishonestly, usually. Someone picks the five or six properties they think matter — scarcity, speed, privacy, adoption, security — weighs them by feel, and arrives at the conclusion their weighting implied. Then they write it up as though the weighting were obvious. It is not obvious. It is the argument, disguised as a preamble.
The alternative is to define the test first, in public, before anyone is scored — and then to apply it the same way to everything, including the thing you are hoping will win. That is harder than it sounds, because it means you can lose, and it means the reader can catch you.
This chapter is about a document that tried to do it that way.
Where the list came from Todd Lewis, Epic Cash's lead engineer, and Todd Pitner, the author of this book, began with a thought experiment: what would superior money actually have to do, if you wrote the list down before looking at any coin? It became a series of videos comparing Epic Cash, Bitcoin, gold, Federal Reserve notes and central bank digital currencies against the same questions, and then a document, so that the questions could be argued with rather than just watched.
The list that came out of it is thirty-two attributes long. It is not a marketing document dressed as a framework; it is a framework that happened to produce a result its authors liked, which is a different and more dangerous thing. The distinction matters, and this chapter is largely about how to tell them apart.
Definitions before scores The document does something that most comparisons skip. Before scoring anything, it defines each attribute — and the definitions are where the work actually happens.
Take three.
Private by default is defined as: all transactions are confidential, revealing neither addresses nor amounts nor IP. Notice what that excludes. A coin where privacy is a setting is not private by default, because the default is what most people use. A coin that hides amounts but shows addresses is not private by default either. The definition is doing the work that an adjective would otherwise be allowed to fudge.
Fungible is defined as trading two assets with no meaningful distinction between them. Then the document explains the mechanism it is describing: coins that melt down and reappear with no history. Again, the definition is precise enough to fail. A coin whose units can be graded fails it, no matter how the marketing reads.
Fair launch is defined as the team acting in good faith to assure fair access from the moment of mainnet — announced on ordinary channels, mineable by hardware people already own. That definition excludes a presale, a foundation allocation, a venture round, and a quiet early unlock. It is a hard test, and it is meant to be.
This is the part of the document worth stealing even if you never buy anything. A defined attribute can be checked. An undefined one can only be asserted.
The thirty-two They fall into five rough families — what money must do, who controls it, what it protects, how it is built, and how it reaches people — though the document presents them as a single flat list and scores them equally. Here they are in the document's own order.
# ATTRIBUTE # ATTRIBUTE Means of payment Fair launch Peer to peer Publicly verifiable Divisible Trust minimized Digital Permissionless Borderless Immutable Unit of account Neutral Private by default Survivable Decentralized Eco-friendly Fungible Open governance Surveillance resistant Regulation friendly Politically resistant Durable Censorship resistant Scalable and fast # ATTRIBUTE # ATTRIBUTE Confiscation resistant Portable and mobile Scarce Available to the unbanked Store of value Widespread acceptance Inflation resistant Quantum future proofed That blank column is the most important design decision in the document. A scorecard that cannot be used on a new entrant is a marketing table. A scorecard with an empty column is a tool.
Why thirty-two, and not five Because five is where the discretion hides.
Pick five attributes and any asset can be made to win: choose privacy, scalability, low fees, fair launch and community, and one answer emerges; choose liquidity, institutional adoption, regulatory clarity, brand recognition and settlement volume, and a completely different one does. Both lists would be defensible. Neither would be honest, because the choice of list was the argument.
Thirty-two is long enough that the list itself stops being a lever. It includes attributes that favor Bitcoin (brand, liquidity, settlement history), attributes that favor Monero (default privacy, ring signatures, a decade of adversarial testing), attributes that favor gold (durability, neutrality, five thousand years of monetary history), and attributes that favor nobody in particular but matter anyway (quantum agility, survivability, regulation friendliness).
A long list is not automatically a fair list. It is simply harder to rig without it showing.
The weakness of the method, stated plainly There are two objections to scoring a coin this way, and both are fair.
The first is equal weighting. If all thirty-two count the same, then a coin that is excellent at trivia and mediocre at the things that decide whether money works can still score well. Anyone who has ever built a rubric knows this. The document does not weight, and it does not claim to; it counts. The reader is free to look at which attributes a coin missed and decide whether the misses matter.
The second is self-scoring. The authors defined the attributes, applied them, and published the result. That is exactly the structure of a rigged test, and the only defense is transparency: every definition is in the document, every tick is visible, and the reader can disagree with any of them in public. A rigged test hides its definitions. This one puts them on page two.
Which brings us to the result, and to the thing that makes the whole exercise credible.
The result the authors published Epic Cash scores thirty-one out of thirty-two.
The attribute it misses is widespread acceptance — mass adoption, integrated anywhere people would use money. The framework's own authors, who built the list, who defined every term, who are plainly sympathetic to the subject, scored it against themselves and published the miss.
That single empty box is worth more than the thirty-one ticks, and it is the reason this book can use the scorecard without embarrassment. A document that produced a perfect score would have told you what kind of document it was. This one told you what kind of question it was.
The next chapter runs the same test across the field — Bitcoin, gold, Monero, Zcash, a stablecoin and a fiat currency — and shows the working. Then Part III asks the only question the scorecard leaves open: what is actually inside the design that produces those ticks, and is any of it overstated?
Before we go on If you take one thing from this chapter, take the method rather than the result.
Write down what money must do before you look at any coin. Define each property so precisely that an asset can fail it. Apply the list to everything, including the thing you already own. Then look at what is missing, and ask whether the missing thing is a flaw in the asset or a fact about the world that no design can fix yet.
That is the whole discipline. Everything else in this book is an application of it.