The question was once taboo. It no longer is.
Since the end of the Bretton Woods agreements in 1971, the world has rested on a single monetary pillar: the US dollar. A national currency used as a world currency — a historical anomaly that enabled unprecedented expansion in global trade, financialization and global indebtedness.
But today, cracks are appearing everywhere. Runaway US debt, geopolitical fragmentation, extraterritorial sanctions, the rise of BRICS, energy crises, structural inflation, banking instability, climate disruption. More and more actors are asking a once-unthinkable question: what if the dollar system were to falter?
What follows is not a prediction. It is an exercise in lucidity. If this pillar fell tomorrow, what could realistically replace it — and what would that choice tell us about the civilization we want to build?
The Dollar: Colossal Privilege, Structural Contradiction
The current system gives the United States an advantage no other state has ever enjoyed: financing its deficits in its own currency, importing real resources in exchange for debt, imposing sanctions through the global financial system, and influencing planetary liquidity through the Federal Reserve.
But this privilege contains a long-recognized contradiction: the Triffin Dilemma. To supply dollars to the rest of the world, the US must continually run deficits. But the more it does so, the more confidence in the currency eventually erodes. The system needs a permanent excess of debt to survive.
This logic is now in frontal collision with ecological limits, energy scarcity, geopolitical tensions and chronic financial instability. The dollar system functions like a gigantic thermodynamic machine of perpetual expansion. Yet no physical structure can grow indefinitely in a finite world.
Option 1 — Bitcoin: Scarcity as Ideology
Bitcoin is often presented as the natural successor to the dollar: limited supply, no central bank, censorship resistance, political neutrality. In a world marked by distrust of states, it appears as a decentralized monetary refuge.
But Bitcoin reproduces the flaws of gold: monetary rigidity, extractive logic, patrimonial asymmetry. A purely deflationary currency mechanically favors wealth concentration, hoarding and speculation.
Above all, Bitcoin contains no mechanism for ecological regulation, redistribution or collective economic orientation. It may constitute a speculative asset or a tool of individual sovereignty. Hardly a complete global monetary architecture.
Option 2 — BRICS: Multipolarity Without a System
The BRICS have been working for several years to reduce their dollar dependence: bilateral trade in national currencies, alternative payment systems, gold accumulation, common currency projects. This dynamic reflects a deep reality — the world is becoming multipolar.
But the BRICS do not yet propose a coherent monetary system. They bring together divergent geopolitical interests, incompatible economic models and significant strategic rivalries. An international currency requires global trust, a stable architecture and credible governance.
Replacing one hegemony with several competing powers does not resolve the fundamental imbalances of the world system. It can even amplify them.
Option 3 — MMT: Saving the Current System Through Money Creation
Modern Monetary Theory holds that a sovereign state issuing its own currency cannot go bankrupt in that currency. The real limit is not financial, but inflationary and productive. The state can therefore massively finance infrastructure, employment and ecological transition.
MMT has the merit of debunking several contemporary myths, notably the idea that a state operates like a household. But it raises a fundamentally undertreated question: what becomes of unlimited money creation in an ecologically finite world?
If money activates real production, that production must still be compatible with available resources, biological equilibria and energy capacities. MMT corrects some neoliberal impasses. It does not resolve the thermodynamic question.
Option 4 — NEMO IMS: Changing What Money Rewards
NEMO IMS starts from a simple observation: the problem is not just money. The problem is the civilizational orientation of the monetary system. Today's global money primarily rewards extraction, quantitative growth, financialization and entropic acceleration.
NEMO IMS proposes instead a currency designed to favor systemic robustness, ecological sustainability and social resilience.
- Unlike the dollar: no national currency dominates, trade imbalances are compensated differently, money creation is oriented toward regenerative goals.
- Unlike Bitcoin: money is not a scarce speculative asset, but a dynamic tool of collective organization.
- Unlike the BRICS: the system is not built on imperial rivalry between powers.
- Unlike MMT: money creation is explicitly linked to physical and ecosystemic constraints.
The central idea: a currency should not only measure market value. It should reflect the compatibility of human activities with the conditions for the stability of the living world.
The Real Stakes: What Civilization Do We Want to Finance?
The question of the "dollar replacement" is often poorly framed. The real issue is not simply which currency to use, or which power will dominate tomorrow.
The real question is: what type of civilization does our monetary system encourage?
For every currency is a behavioral architecture. It rewards certain behaviors and penalizes others. It shapes economic priorities, social imaginaries, power relations, and even our relationship to time and to living systems.
The dollar system financed the extractive globalization of the 20th century. The next monetary system will determine our capacity to navigate planetary limits, geopolitical stability in the 21st century, and the very possibility of a sustainable civilization.
No currency is a magic solution. But not all alternatives are equal. The question is not technical. It is eminently political — and civilizational.
Can a civilization survive in the long run with a monetary system that structurally rewards the acceleration of entropy?
That may be where the real debate of the 21st century will be decided.
Jean-Christophe Duval