Scoring is easy when the subject is someone else's coin.
It becomes uncomfortable the moment you apply the same list to the thing you already own, because the list does not care what you paid for it. That is the point of writing the definitions down first: they stop being negotiable when the result arrives.
What follows is the same thirty-two questions, applied to six assets. The judgments are mine and they are argued in the open. Where a cell is a matter of interpretation rather than fact, the text says so. Where you disagree, the definitions are on the previous pages and the arithmetic is on this one.
A note on scope. The original document scored Epic Cash, Bitcoin, gold, Federal Reserve notes and central bank digital currencies. I have added Monero, Zcash and a stablecoin, because those are the three things a reader of this book is most likely to be holding instead, and a comparison that omits them is not a comparison.
The count ASSET PASSES WHAT IT MISSES THAT MATTERS MOST Epic Cash 31 / 32 Widespread acceptance Monero 24 / 32 Scarcity, scale, unit of account, adoption Bitcoin 20 / 32 Privacy, fungibility, scale, unit of account Zcash 20 / 32 Default privacy, fungibility, fair launch ASSET PASSES WHAT IT MISSES THAT MATTERS MOST Gold 15 / 32 Digital, divisible in practice, portable, scalable, verifiable Stablecoin 12 / 32 Decentralized, scarce, private, permissionless, uncensorable Fiat (USD) 11 / 32 Scarce, private, permissionless, censorship resistant, store of value Counts are ours, applied to the definitions in the previous chapter; the full matrix, attribute by attribute, is in Appendix A. Disagreements belong in the margin.
Read the column, not the ranking. The number of ticks is a summary of the argument, not a substitute for it, and the assets at the top and bottom of this table are not comparable in the way a league table implies. What matters is which boxes each one misses, and whether those misses are the ones that would hurt you.
Bitcoin: the settlement layer that forgot to be cash Bitcoin passes twenty. It wins the attributes that made it famous: scarce, decentralized, permissionless, immutable, trust minimized, publicly verifiable, fair launch, store of value, inflation resistant. Those are not small things, and no honest scoring can take them away.
It fails the privacy cluster almost completely. Not private by default, not fungible, not surveillance resistant, not confiscation resistant in any meaningful sense once an address is linked to a person. It fails the exchange cluster too: unit of account, scale, cost per payment.
The most interesting entry in its column is the one that reads as a compliment and functions as a criticism — store of value, yes; medium of exchange, barely. Bitcoin solved the problem of issuing money without an issuer and then became an asset people hold rather than spend. That is a legitimate outcome. It is not the outcome described in the title of the paper.
Gold: the honest answer that cannot move Gold passes about fifteen, and it earns most of them the hard way. Scarce, durable, fungible in practice, neutral, no issuer, five thousand years of monetary history, and a record of holding value through every currency collapse of the modern era.
Then the digital column: not digital, not scalable, not portable, not verifiable without an assay, not divisible in any practical sense, and dependent on vaults and custodians the moment it leaves your hand. A gold coin in your pocket is money. A gold bar in a vault is a claim on an institution, which is the thing chapter two was about.
Gold is the strongest possible answer to "what is money that cannot be printed," and the weakest possible answer to "can I send it to my daughter in Osaka this afternoon."
Monero: the best defaults in the industry Monero passes twenty-four and would pass more if the list weighted privacy, which it does not.
It wins every privacy attribute outright — private by default, fungible, surveillance resistant, censorship resistant, confiscation resistant — and does so without asking the user to choose. Its ring signatures, stealth addresses and RingCT are the most battle-tested privacy construction in production. If the only question were "which of these can I spend without creating a record," Monero wins and the chapter ends here.
It misses scarcity, because its supply is uncapped by design: 0.6 XMR per block, forever. It misses scale: a full node is roughly two hundred gigabytes and grows with every ring signature. It misses unit of account and adoption, as all of these do. And it keeps spent data forever, which is the opposite of the property that makes a chain small enough to run on a laptop.
None of that makes it a bad coin. It makes it a coin with a different center of gravity: privacy maximalism at the cost of monetary hardness and light validation.
Zcash: the cryptography is not the problem Zcash scores around twenty, and the arithmetic is unkind to it in a way that has nothing to do with the quality of its mathematics.
It fails private by default, because privacy is optional and the transparent chain is the default path for most transactions. It fails fungible, for the same reason — if some coins move through a shielded pool and some do not, the two are distinguishable. It fails fair launch, because twenty percent of the early issuance went to the founders over four years. It fails scale and eco- friendliness for the usual proof-of-work reasons, and adoption as everyone does.
What it passes, it passes impressively: scarce, decentralized enough, immutable, publicly verifiable, trust minimized at the protocol level, and secure by construction in ways that took real cryptographic ambition to achieve. The Orchard pool is a genuine technical achievement.
The scoring simply records a structural fact: a privacy feature that most users do not use protects neither the users who do nor the ones who do not.
The stablecoin: convenience with an owner The stablecoin scores about twelve, and every one of its passes is a usability attribute — means of payment, divisible, digital, borderless, portable, scalable, unit of account over short horizons, available to the unbanked in the sense that anyone with a phone can hold one.
It fails everything structural. Not decentralized: an issuer decides. Not scarce: supply expands when the issuer decides to expand it. Not private: transfers are visible and the issuer knows who you are. Not permissionless: addresses are frozen, routinely, in the billions of dollars, in an afternoon. Not censorship resistant, not confiscation resistant, not trust minimized, not immutable.
A stablecoin is a bank account with a public transaction history and an owner who can switch it off. That is genuinely useful for moving dollars across borders. It is not money in the sense this book has been using the word, and the eight billion dollars frozen in a single day in October 2026 is the cleanest demonstration available.
Fiat: the baseline Eleven out of thirty-two, and most of those are usability. It works everywhere, divides, settles, prices, and is accepted by everyone. It is also not scarce, not private, not permissionless, not censorship resistant, not a store of value over a lifetime, and not something you hold — you hold a claim on an institution, denominated in a unit that institution's central bank can issue more of.
The score is not a criticism of the dollar's usefulness. It is a description of what the dollar is for: settlement inside a jurisdiction, at scale, with a central authority deciding the terms.
Epic Cash: thirty-one, and the box that is empty Epic passes thirty-one of the thirty-two, and the one it misses is the one this book has been circling since the first page: widespread acceptance.
That is not a rounding error and it is not a technicality. An asset that nobody accepts is not yet money, whatever its properties. It is a design that has not been adopted, which is a different thing from a design that has failed — but the difference is only visible in hindsight, and no scorecard can settle it.
Every other row in the Epic column is a claim that chapter seven onwards has to justify. Private by default, with no addresses or amounts to hide. Fungible, because there is no history to grade. Scarce, at twenty-one million, on a schedule that converges with Bitcoin's in May 2028. Decentralized, mined across three algorithms on hardware people already own. Scalable, because spent data is cut away and the chain is about four gigabytes after three million blocks.
Those are the claims. The next three chapters take them one at a time.
What the table cannot tell you Two things, and both matter.
It cannot weight. Equal weighting is the fairest default and the least useful one, because it treats "durable" and "available to the unbanked" as equally decision-relevant. If you are a person in a country with capital controls, censorship resistance is worth more than divisibility. If you are a business settling invoices, speed and stability are worth more than neutrality. The table gives you the raw material for a decision; it does not make the decision.
It cannot measure the future. Widespread acceptance sits in the Epic column as a miss today. It sat in the Bitcoin column as a miss in 2011. A scorecard is a snapshot of a design and its adoption, not a forecast, and anyone who reads it as one is using it wrong.
With those caveats stated, the arithmetic is on the table. Epic Cash is the only asset here that satisfies the monetary, privacy and construction attributes simultaneously — and the only one whose missing attribute is a matter of time rather than architecture.
That claim now needs to be examined rather than asserted. Part III opens the design.