Article XV: Monetary system

Section 1 — Central Bank

  1. There shall be a single public service (the Central Bank) which is a computer system that implements the monetary system to be used by Citizens for commerce, taxation, and the funding of public services.
  2. The Central Bank shall not itself have reserves, either in the form of commodities or monetary accounts. The Central Bank shall not hold assets of any kind, whether financial, physical, or digital.
  3. The Central Bank shall not borrow or lend.
  4. The Central Bank shall not perform currency exchange of any kind, nor act as a counterparty in foreign exchange markets. All currency conversion shall occur exclusively through voluntary transactions in the free market.
  5. The Central Bank Payment System (CBPS) is a subsystem of the Central Bank.

Section 2 — Fiat Currency

  1. The Central Bank shall implement a fiat currency.
  2. The fiat currency shall:
    • Exist only as non‑negative balances on Central Bank accounts.
    • Be transferable between Central Bank accounts and require permission by the owner of the source account (the "sender") and not require permission by the owner of the destination account (the "receiver").
    • Not be backed by any commodity.
    • Not be created or destroyed at any time.
    • All transfers shall preserve total currency supply exactly, without rounding loss.
    • Float against other currencies.

Section 3 — Central Bank Accounts

  1. Accounts shall be free to create and use, and may be held by any person.
  2. Every Central Bank account shall have a zero balance when created.
  3. Every Central Bank Account shall have exactly one owner. Joint ownership of accounts is not permitted.
  4. All Accounts owned by a person shall be bound to a single, unique legal identity through a secure biometric identity‑verification system. The identity‑verification system shall be designed to be highly reliable, tamper‑resistant, and robust against impersonation, duplication, or fraud. The law shall ensure that no person can obtain, control, or operate more than one identity within the Central Bank Payment System.
  5. The privacy and autonomy of account holders shall be protected.
  6. Auditing of transaction history of an account for criminal investigations must be justified and shall require a warrant.
  7. Abandoned Central Bank accounts are closed and the balance is credited to UBI. An account shall be deemed abandoned only after a period of fifty years of inactivity defined by law, which shall not be less than fifty years.

Section 4 — Central Bank Implementation

  1. The Central Bank shall be implemented in accordance with Appendix D: Central Bank Implementation.
  2. The Central Bank shall operate as a distributed system in which each Account is owned by a single authoritative node that alone is authorised to initiate debits from that Account. All outgoing transfers shall be recorded in an append‑only, strictly ordered transaction log maintained by the owning node, and each transfer shall bear a unique, monotonically increasing sequence number for that Account.
  3. Nodes shall exchange transaction information in a manner that ensures that all credits to receiving Accounts are applied exactly once, in the order created, and as atomic batches. The implementation shall guarantee that no Account balance can become negative, that no transfer can be duplicated or replayed, and that all nodes converge to a consistent state under stable network conditions.
  4. The specific communication protocols, data formats, and storage mechanisms used to achieve these guarantees shall be determined by law, provided they satisfy the invariants mandated by this Constitution.
  5. The Central Bank shall not employ global consensus mechanisms for transaction ordering or validation.
  6. The implementation shall be capable of millions of transactions per second.

Section 5 — System Integrity Requirements

  1. The Central Bank shall employ storage and processing mechanisms that guarantee atomicity, crash‑safety, redundancy, and recoverability. All updates to Account balances, transaction logs, and replication state shall be applied atomically, such that no partial or inconsistent state may arise from system failure.
  2. The implementation shall ensure that no hardware or software failure, including loss of power or storage media, can result in the creation or destruction of currency, the duplication of transfers, or the corruption of Account balances.
  3. The Central Bank shall maintain sufficient redundant and durable records to allow full recovery of all Account balances, transaction logs, and replication state after any permitted failure. The specific technologies used to achieve these guarantees shall be determined by law, provided they satisfy the invariants mandated by this Constitution.
  4. No system failure or recovery process shall permit the rollback of any committed debit.