This is not a bitcoin article. It's all about stablecoins and fiat money. But it's got a lot of interesting things to think about.

There's a nice opening description of inflation in Argentina:

I'm Argentine by nationality but I grew up abroad, which for years put me in an awkward spot: I couldn't use the local QR payment apps, and paying with a foreign card meant eating a brutal exchange rate thanks to capital controls. So it was always cash. In 2023 the largest bill in the country was 1,000 pesos about a dollar. A normal dinner was a literal stack of paper, and it was completely normal to start the day with a full wallet and end the night unable to pay for a taxi: not because you'd run out of money, but because you'd run out of bills.

The most absurd version of this: I remember a few summer dates at nice restaurants in Buenos Aires where I was carrying so much cash that I had to distribute it around my body — socks, underwear, every pocket — just so I didn't walk around with bulges that quietly screamed rob me. When my date went to the bathroom, I'd discreetly pull out stacks of pesos from every hiding spots and count them out on the table with the waiter before she came back. That wasn't me being eccentric. At the time there was genuinely no other way to pay!

So the practical question Minoprio poses is this: why not print some bigger bills?

Well, it's not politically a good look for Milei to be adding zeroes to the numbers on the pesos. So, what if a stablecoin company started printing some of these larger denomination bills?

Picture a physical note that looks and feels like real currency: proper paper, proper anti-counterfeiting features, but is backed 1:1 by a peso stablecoin instead.

It carries two QR codes. The first is printed in the open, on the front. Anyone can scan it to see the bill is real and fully backed. You verify the money without destroying it. The second QR is hidden under a scratch-off layer on the back, the way a lottery ticket hides its numbers. As long as the panel is intact, the note circulates hand to hand like cash. The moment you scratch it, you're claiming the value: the underlying stablecoin gets redeemed straight into your bank account or your Mercado Pago, and that specific note is spent.

He then goes into a pretty cool description of the private Russian money printed by A7A5, complete with pictures:

He makes a strong case that Argentina needs something:

The largest bill is 20,000 pesos, roughly $15, useless for any big purchase and a daily friction for everyone else. There's an obvious, unfilled space for larger denominations, and no sign the central bank intends to fill it.

And he thinks it benefits the Argentine treasury as well:

It also does something the Treasury, specifically, should want. Right now Argentina's peso debt is bought by a thin, jittery set of local players, in a market that's been burned too often to be generous about it. A peso stablecoin that holds Treasury paper as its reserves introduces a completely different kind of buyer — one whose appetite for government debt isn't a bet on Argentine risk at all, but a function of how much cash the public wants to carry. The more these notes circulate, the bigger the reserve pool behind them, and the bigger the standing bid for Treasury paper — a bid that can't flee at the first bad headline, because those reserves stay locked as backing for as long as the notes sit in people's wallets. It quietly converts the country's demand for cash into demand for government debt.

This sounds a little like some of the dreams of glory that the purveyors of stablecoins north of the equator have been saying: stablecoins are here to solve your national debt problem -- and I don't quite buy it. But I wonder if we will see something like this soon: a private stablecoin issuing physical notes.

I seem to remember some ecash projects like this.