Only Money, Much Dog: BIS Paper Gives Bitcoin the Meme Treatment

The BIS paper “Money and the Architecture of Trust,” published this month, uses a meme to frame bitcoin ($BTC) and gold as “only money,” not IOUs, and agrees with Michael Saylor on a key point.

Authored by Iñaki Aldasoro, an economist at the BIS, the paper centers on a dog meme depicting a dog that wants “only money,” rather than IOUs. Aldasoro uses the image to describe the mindset behind gold and bitcoin.

The meme also refers to Luca Pacioli, the Italian mathematician credited with the first published systematic treatment of double-entry bookkeeping in the 15th century. Its appearance in the paper brings together Pacioli’s accounting legacy and the money-only premise applied to gold and bitcoin.