Solum began with a simple, annoying question:
Is crypto trading actually “investing”… or just dressed-up gambling?
From that question grew something different—not another trading token, but a thought experiment: what would money look like if it was designed for human dignity instead of speculation?
Imagine a money system that belongs to everyone, quietly shares its surplus, and doesn’t need a king, a central bank, or a Silicon Valley company to run it.
1. What’s wrong with money as we know it?
Most of us don’t spend our days thinking about monetary policy. We just feel the symptoms:
- Prices creep up faster than wages.
- Savings melt when interest rates and inflation misbehave.
- Money creation feels like a game played far away, by people we never voted for.
- New “crypto wealth” mostly flows to the already-comfortable and well-connected.
We work, we pay, we worry—and it can feel like the scoreboard is rigged.
2. A much older idea hiding underneath
A hundred years ago, an engineer named C. H. Douglas noticed something odd in industrial economies: people were never paid enough, in total, to buy all the things they collectively produced.
He thought this wasn’t a moral failing, but a design problem. Factories could pour out goods, but the money system didn’t feed enough purchasing power back to the people who made those goods.
His answer, which he called Social Credit, had two big ideas:
- A national dividend – every citizen gets a regular payment, simply for being part of the community.
- A fair-price mechanism – so the total money in people’s pockets roughly matches the value of things on the shelves.
Douglas saw money as a public utility – more like a power grid or road network than a private casino.
3. What is Solum in plain language?
Solum takes Douglas’s moral instinct and asks: “What if we rebuilt that idea using modern cryptography instead of ministries and banks?”
3.1 The one-sentence version
Solum is a concept for digital money that quietly shares new value with every real human, protects privacy by default, and runs by clear rules in open code instead of back-room deals.
3.2 What Solum would try to do
- Universal “thank-you” money: each verified person receives a small, regular dividend—no application forms, no special status, no charity label.
- No energy-wasting mining: Solum would not rely on burning electricity to “win blocks” like Bitcoin.
- No hidden masters: the rules for creating and distributing money would live in public code, not inside a central bank meeting.
- Privacy as a default, not a luxury: the system would hide what you earn and spend, while still allowing you to prove things if you choose (“Yes, I’m eligible”; “Yes, this account was audited”).
- Calm technology: it would work on ordinary computers and kiosks, not just addictive phones and financial trading apps.
3.3 What Solum is not
- Not a get-rich-quick scheme.
- Not a trading platform for day-traders.
- Not a surveillance coin in “social credit score” clothing.
- Not a rival government or religion.
- Not a finished product you can buy today.
4. How would it roughly work?
4.1 A shared “math book” instead of a bank ledger
Picture a giant public notebook in the sky. It doesn’t show names and faces, but it does keep track of where coins move—by numbers, not identities.
Thousands of computers around the world keep identical copies. Every few seconds they compare notes. If they all agree that “this account sent 5 coins to that account and had enough to do so,” the page is locked. No one person, company, or government can quietly edit it later.
4.2 One human, one share of the surplus
Solum’s most radical idea is simple: every real human should get a small slice of newly created money, simply for being here.
The hard part is proving “real human” without building a creepy ID database. That’s where privacy-preserving “proof of personhood” comes in:
- You’d go through an identity check once (or occasionally), using tools that live on your own device, not on some central server.
- The system would give you a kind of cryptographic badge that says, “this wallet belongs to a real, unique person” without revealing who.
- That badge would let you claim your dividend and vote on big changes—without your name ever appearing on the public ledger.
4.3 A universal dividend instead of interest games
New Solum coins would appear at a steady rhythm—like a tree putting out new leaves each season. Instead of all that new money going first to big lenders and asset owners, part of it would go:
- To the people who run the network (for keeping it honest and secure).
- And another part directly to every verified human—a universal dividend.
No application, no means test, no bureaucracy. If you’re human and you’ve proved it in a privacy-respecting way, you get your small share.
4.4 Calm technology and Altima Linux
While phones would likely be the most common interface, Solum is meant to work without forcing people into always-online, always-scrolling lifestyles.
One part of that vision is linking Solum to a “quiet computer” environment: Altima Linux – a minimal, privacy-first desktop where you can manage your money without ads, trackers, or casino-like distractions.
Community kiosks, local shops, libraries and cooperatives could run Altima machines, giving people access to Solum even if they don’t have a smartphone or stable internet at home.
5. Why hasn’t something like Solum already taken off?
The ingredients for a humane digital money system are mostly here, but several big obstacles remain:
5.1 Identity without surveillance is hard
Saying “one human, one wallet” is easy. Doing it without passports, facial databases, or fingerprint files is not.
Most existing projects either:
- collect too much personal data, or
- get overwhelmed by bots and fake accounts.
Solum’s idea of privacy-first proof-of-personhood is possible in theory, but still experimental in practice.
5.2 It threatens existing power structures
A system that:
- can’t easily be frozen, inflated, or steered, and
- hands out dividends automatically, not politically
…is not something central banks and large commercial interests are eager to promote.
5.3 It’s not built for quick profit
Venture capital likes products that generate monopoly power and high returns. A fair, non-extractive public money system is, almost by definition, bad at making early investors absurdly rich.
That makes it harder to fund in the usual way.
6. Why talk about this at all?
You may be thinking: “Nice dream, but I still have bills to pay on Friday.”
Fair point.
The point of Solum is not to sell you a token or a magic escape hatch from the real economy. It’s to widen the conversation:
- Is it acceptable that most money creation flows first to those who already own assets?
- Could we quietly build systems that return some of that surplus to the people who keep society running?
- Can we design digital money that doesn’t turn every screen into a slot machine?
Solum is a sketch on the table—a way of asking better questions about money, dignity, and what we owe each other.
7. Where is Solum now?
Today, Solum is a concept and a working draft, not a live currency you can download and spend.
There is no official token, no ICO, no “buy now” button, and no promise that such a network will ever launch in the form described here.
If something like Solum ever does emerge—whether under this name or another—it will only work if:
- ordinary people can understand the basic idea
- the rules are visibly fair
- and communities choose it because it serves them, not because it made a few early speculators rich.
8. A closing note
We live inside systems most of us never got to vote on. Money is one of the biggest of those systems. It shapes what is possible in our lives, even when we are too busy surviving to think about it.
The Solum Conversation is an invitation to step outside that default for a moment and ask:
If we were starting from scratch today—with the tools we now have—how would we design money for a decent society?
Not perfect. Not utopian. Just decent.
Solum is one sketched answer.