BIS PAPER 175 SAYS BITCOIN’S FIXED SUPPLY IS “UNRESPONSIVE TO ANY CONCEIVABLE STATE OF THE WORLD” — ITS SECOND CHARGE, ENDLESS ISSUANCE, RESTS ON COUNTS OF OTHER TOKENS

On October 14, 2026, the Bank for International Settlements published Paper 175, “Money and the architecture of trust,” by its economist Iñaki Aldasoro. The views are the author’s, the cover says, not necessarily the BIS’s. His case is that money is “a system of interlocking promises sustained by trust,” held up by a central bank and by “backstops that socialise the inherent fragility” of a system built on promises. Bitcoin gets a section with gold, titled “Gold, bitcoin and the negation of trust.”

The charge is about supply. Bitcoin’s fixed supply and issuance schedule, he writes, “are set by code and unresponsive to any conceivable state of the world.” The fault he names: “no lender of last resort and no balance sheet that can expand to supply settlement means when the survival constraint binds.” Put plainly, when debtors cannot pay, he wants someone able to make new money. That is the bailout. And the backstop he praises spreads the cost to everyone holding the money. Bitcoin refuses that bargain on purpose.

His second charge is that crypto is undisciplined: “coins and tokens are issued continually and with essentially no constraint.” The footnote behind it counts about 8,000 assets on CoinMarketCap and some 18,600 on CoinGecko. That is a charge against other coins. The same paragraph has just said bitcoin’s supply is fixed by code. So of the two halves of his “inversion,” only one lands on bitcoin, and it is the fixed supply itself.

To his credit, the paper names the real dispute. “The desire for an asset that is no one’s liability is a desire to exit the social compact that money embodies.” He says all money is someone’s IOU. Bitcoin is nobody’s IOU. A central bank paper calling that a defect is telling you what the central bank needs money to be. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $84,686.