The Coin and the Collar: The GENIUS Act Is a Trap, Not a Reform

How Stablecoins, Surveillance, and Branded Scrip Are Being Sold as Innovation—Whilst the Poor Get Programmed Into Compliance

The GENIUS Act doesn’t regulate stablecoin—it legalises a system of programmable scrip that traps the poor in branded coin economies. This is the infrastructure of compliance, not care. You don’t get paid. You get permission.

Introduction: This Isn’t About Crypto. It’s About Power

It’s Memorial Day Monday and I’m home, the morning news droning quietly in the background. A half-drunk cup of tea sits beside me on the table. I’m not really watching—until the chyron catches my eye: “GENIUS Act Clears Key Senate Vote—Likely to Pass by Summer.” I blink. The what? The GENIUS Act? Never heard of it. Something to do with crypto, apparently. Regulation. Innovation. Consumer protection.

Microsoft’s Copilot giving a not so neutral view of the GENIUS Act. “Enhancing national security?” Hmmm …..

But as I dig deeper—through policy blogs, crypto newsfeeds, Beltway summaries—it becomes painfully, nauseatingly clear: this isn’t regulation in any meaningful sense. It’s enclosure. It’s the legal foundation for a whole new layer of corporate money. Not public money. Not digital cash. Not freedom. Scrip. Branded, programmed, surveilled scrip.

What the GENIUS Act actually enables is the creation of private, pegged digital currencies—“stablecoins”—by banks, yes, but also by corporations and nonbank institutions. These aren’t speculative meme tokens. They’re meant to be pegged to the US dollar, regulated just enough to pass muster, and then unleashed at scale. Amazon could issue AMZCoin. Meta could launch MetaCoin 2.0. Apple, your university, your public school district, your local health authority—any of them could start paying wages, stipends, aid, and refunds in these new coins. And as long as they’re technically redeemable, it’s legal. But “redeemable” is doing a lot of work. Redemption may be delayed, gated, conditional, or costly. What matters isn’t that the money is real. It’s that the issuer controls your access to it.

I fall into a grim thought spiral, testing scenarios. What happens when LAUSD pays you in LAUSD Coin, and it can’t be used for your rent or your HRT? What happens when CSUCoin replaces financial aid disbursements, but can only be spent in on-campus stores and “partner vendors” with mark-ups baked in? What happens when undocumented migrants—denied wallets due to KYC laws—are paid under the table in platform coins they can’t cash out legally? What happens when the redemption system fails, and you’re left holding a bag of branded tokens worth nothing outside the digital campus gate? Every route I follow seems to loop back to the same conclusion: poor people lose. We lose autonomy, liquidity, time, and safety. We’re turned from workers into users—data points, spending metrics, loyalty flows. The GENIUS Act doesn’t build a better payment system. It builds the machinery for programmable poverty.

And that’s the part that sticks. This isn’t about crypto. It’s not about innovation or freedom or financial inclusion. It’s about power—who issues it, who redeems it, who controls the terms of your survival. This is cyberlibertarianism dressed up as economic justice, predatory capitalism rebranded as efficiency (yes, I know that’s redundant). And it’s coming fast. The Senate just cleared it. The House is next. No one asked us. No one warned us. But by the time school starts again in the autumn, the legal groundwork for scrip 2.0 might already be in place. Tokens for the poor. Real money for the rich. And a collar—digital, invisible, and unbreakable—for anyone who can’t afford to walk away.

What the GENIUS Act Actually Does

What the GENIUS Act claims to do—and what it actually enables—are two very different things. According to its Senate author, it’s a “commonsense framework” to regulate stablecoins: digital tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar and “backed 1:1” by real reserves. The messaging is slick—this isn’t crypto chaos, it’s supposed to be safe, secure, and fully redeemable. A way to encourage innovation whilst protecting consumers. But the devil is always in the details. And if you’ve ever had to fight your way through a benefits office, or navigate a wage dispute with no HR in sight, you already know: terms like ‘protection’ and ‘clarity’ usually mean someone else is making the rules—and you’re at the bottom of the list.

Here’s what the bill actually does: it creates a legal framework that lets banks, nonbanks, and corporations issue their own money. Not metaphorical money. Literal, functional currency, issued as stablecoins, exchangeable for goods and services—but only under the issuer’s terms. These aren’t like Visa points or in-game credits. These are digital dollars in all but name, usable within controlled platforms and possibly even required for employment, education, or public services. Yes, the law requires that coins be backed by real assets—cash, Treasuries, or “other liquid reserves.” But that doesn’t mean they’re safe, or even accessible. A 1:1 backing doesn’t mean you’ll actually be able to cash out 1:1, especially not if the issuer decides to stall, restrict, or penalise redemptions. Just ask anyone who’s tried to get their paycheck from a payroll card that charges $2 per ATM withdrawal.

The bill puts virtually no meaningful limits on who can issue these coins or how they can be used to monitor or restrict spending. A public school district could issue coins for students and staff. A university could replace all cash aid with campus coin. A major retailer could pay its warehouse workers in branded tokens that only work in its own ecosystem. The law doesn’t prohibit any of that. It encourages it, under the guise of “innovation.” And the most chilling part? There’s no clear consumer protection framework baked into the redemption side. No guarantee that you’ll be able to use your coin anywhere outside the walled garden of the issuing entity. No right to appeal if your wallet is frozen or flagged. No fallback if you lose access due to a policy change, a dispute, or even a glitch.

So whilst the press releases talk about safety and inclusion, the actual architecture of the bill sets up a new class of digital currency issuers—private mints, in effect—with the power to define the value, terms, and usability of what you earn. And once those coins are out in the world, you don’t hold the power. They do. You hold tokens. You hold conditions. You hold a receipt that only works if the issuer keeps their promise and the system doesn’t turn on you. And if it does? Well, we know how that story ends.

The Fantasy and the Fallout

The fantasy is sleek, frictionless, and always just around the corner. The tech pitch—parroted by lawmakers across party lines—is that stablecoins are a way to modernise money itself. Programmable, efficient, borderless. Imagine, they say, a world without banks skimming fees, without waiting days for a transfer, without central authorities blocking payments. Programmable money that moves instantly. Smart contracts that release funds when milestones are met. Decentralised value exchange—clean, digital, democratic. This is the cyberlibertarian dream. A money system that supposedly sets you free.

But whose freedom are we talking about? For years, far-right pundits warned about government-backed digital currency—CBDCs—as the beginning of the end. They spun tales of dystopias where the state could freeze your account for wrongthink, or stop you buying red meat or guns, or limit your travel. And yet, now that the private sector is building something even more powerful, those same voices are conspicuously quiet. It turns out, they don’t mind control—they just want the control to be corporate, not public. What they opposed wasn’t surveillance or coercion—it was government doing it. When it’s Amazon or Meta or a public university issuing the coin, suddenly it’s innovation. Suddenly it’s “letting the market lead.”

But the fallout from this dream is all too real—and entirely predictable. Once multiple institutions and corporations are legally empowered to issue their own coins, we don’t get choice. We get fragmentation. Your job pays you in LAUSD Coin, your uni pays you in CSUCoin, your benefits come in HealthAid Tokens, and your rent still demands actual U.S. dollars. There’s no seamless interoperability. Every coin has its own redemption rules, fees, expiry conditions. You lose value just moving between ecosystems. You lose time trying to keep track. You lose autonomy trying to navigate terms you never agreed to. It’s not one economy—it’s twenty overlapping coin silos, each with their own gatekeepers, their own restrictions, their own surveillance baked into every transaction.

And who bears the brunt of all this? The same people who always get crushed when money becomes a tool of control: poor folks, migrants, disabled people, queer and trans people, anyone already living outside the polite fiction of financial legitimacy. The people for whom a frozen account isn’t an inconvenience—it’s the difference between eating and not. And now, when public systems offload their financial operations to coin economies, there’s no ombudsman, no regulator, no appeal. You try calling a help line to redeem your EduCoin stipend. You try lodging a complaint when your MetaCoin wallet is flagged for “unusual activity” and locked. There’s no Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) coming to save you—not after Trump’s DOGE goon squad gutted it and rewrote the rules to protect lenders, not borrowers; platforms, not people. In these coin ecosystems, you’re not a citizen. You’re not even a customer. You’re a data point. A transaction trail. A variable in someone’s predictive model. A risk score. A line item in a quarterly profit statement. And if the system breaks you? That’s just the cost of doing business.

We’ve seen this before. Company towns. Company scrip. You work in the mine, you’re paid in the mine’s tokens, and those tokens are only good at the mine’s store—where the prices are inflated, the debt is constant, and the exit is always just out of reach. The GENIUS Act doesn’t abolish that model. It digitises it. It makes it scalable. It calls it innovation and wraps it in press releases about “financial inclusion.” But at its core, it’s the same: a money system built to trap, not to liberate. Programmable money doesn’t free people when the programmes are written by the powerful. It just makes the chains more efficient.

Who Pays the Price?

Who pays the price for the GENIUS Act’s shiny new coin economy? The answer is brutally predictable: the people with the least choice. The people already forced to navigate overlapping systems of extraction. The people who can’t afford to lose 10%, 15%, 25% of their income just trying to get their hands on usable cash. What this bill creates isn’t a financial revolution—it’s a hierarchy of currency, where the rich get dollars and equity, and the rest of us get tokenised compliance. And because these new coins aren’t classified cleanly—sometimes assets, sometimes property, sometimes currency, sometimes securities depending on who’s asking and when—the risk is pushed downward, onto the people with the least ability to absorb it.

Workers are among the first in the firing line. Imagine being paid in LAUSD Coin, a stablecoin issued by the Los Angeles Unified School District. You still owe rent in USD. Your phone bill wants dollars. Your groceries require cash or card. But your wages arrive in a coin you can only redeem through a designated app, with a waiting period, a conversion fee, and conditions attached. You might be charged 3% just to get cash out. You might wait three business days—or more if your account gets flagged. If your wallet’s frozen because of a paperwork error or a flagged transaction, you’re out of luck and out of money. The system doesn’t break for you. It breaks you. Workers could lose 10 to 25% of their actual earnings to this machinery—not as tax, but as friction. As the cost of having their time and labour laundered through a branded token economy. And because stablecoins may be treated as property for tax purposes, any appreciation in value before redemption could even trigger capital gains liability. You’re not just being underpaid. You’re being taxed for the privilege.

Students will be next. Universities—especially public systems like CSU and UC—are already experimenting with wallet-based payment systems. Under GENIUS, they’ll be able to issue CSUCoin or UCoin, backed by their own institutional reserves, and use it to disburse financial aid, work-study wages, or even meal stipends. But here’s the trick: those coins may only be usable on campus or with “partner vendors.” The campus bookstore. The overpriced café. The one laundromat that accepts student wallets. If a student wants to buy food from a local co-op, donate to a mutual aid collective, or cover an unexpected medical bill, they may be stuck. Want to redeem your stipend for cash? That’ll be a fee, a delay, a log-in, a transaction audit. And again, because these coins aren’t cleanly categorised, the IRS may treat the aid as taxable income once it’s converted into real-world use. So now your work-study job pays you in digital scrip that can’t buy tampons or transit, and then the state shows up asking for tax on the “gain.” Welcome to financial independence.

Undocumented migrants are, perhaps, in the most precarious position of all. Stablecoin systems almost universally require KYC—Know Your Customer—verification. That means a state ID, a Social Security number, a clear digital footprint. If you’re undocumented, you may be paid under the table in coin—perhaps by a gig platform, perhaps by an employer skirting wage laws. But you can’t legally redeem it. You can’t pass KYC. You can’t access the app. You are locked out of your own earnings. So what happens? You find a broker. Someone who offers to buy your tokens for cash—at 70 cents on the dollar. Or you trade it peer-to-peer, through a Telegram group, hoping the person on the other end doesn’t vanish with your month’s rent. These coins—treated as assets by the IRS, as property by the SEC, as currency by the platforms—become instruments of exclusion. You’re paid in money you can’t touch, can’t track, and can’t complain about. Wage theft becomes untraceable. Exploitation becomes digitised. The coin becomes a muzzle.

And then there are trans and disabled people, for whom algorithmic money poses existential risk. Stablecoins are programmable. That means issuers can decide, through code, where and how you spend. They can block “unapproved vendors,” deny access to categories like mutual aid, alternative medicine, even HRT or sensory supports. All it takes is a policy toggle or a keyword filter. Want to use your campus stipend to help a friend in crisis? Blocked. Want to access a crowdfunded voucher to cover a therapy session that isn’t “mainstream?” Denied. What’s framed as fraud prevention or responsible spending quickly morphs into values enforcement—and if your identity doesn’t fit the institutional definition of legitimacy, your money doesn’t move. Disabled people already face systems that treat them as fraudulent by default. Trans people already fight to prove that their care is “valid.” Programmable coins make that gatekeeping automatic. Invisible. Bureaucratically perfect. The algorithm doesn’t hate you. It just denies your transaction.

In every one of these cases, the classification of the coin shifts to suit the issuer. When it’s about regulation? It’s just a stable currency. When it’s about taxes? It’s an appreciating asset. When it’s about your rights? It’s private property, and you agreed to the terms of service. Meanwhile, for those of us at the bottom of the economic pyramid, it’s always the same: it’s not money, it’s leverage. Something to be earned, gated, restricted, delayed, monitored, and punished. Something that extracts your labour, fragments your autonomy, and turns your survival into a programmable flowchart. This isn’t inclusion. It’s infrastructure-level inequality—code-written class war dressed up as fintech progress.

A System Ripe for Abuse

This system isn’t just dangerous in theory—it’s engineered for abuse in practice. What the GENIUS Act creates isn’t a stable foundation for digital currency. It’s a legal sandbox for the rich and powerful to launder influence, enforce discipline, and extract value from the desperate. The moment coin economies become legitimised and programmable, they stop being neutral tools. They become weapons—subtle, silent, and devastatingly effective.

First, there’s the political grift. Picture TrumpCoin. Or PatriotCoin. Or BlueCoin, if we’re being honest—because let’s not pretend Democrats wouldn’t try their own version. These aren’t speculative meme coins. These are registered stablecoins under the GENIUS Act, pegged to the dollar, with redemption rails and institutional approval. And because they’re not formally classified as campaign contributions or political donations, they offer a clean workaround to finance laws. A foreign government, corporation, or billionaire can simply “purchase” millions in TrumpCoin—not as a donation, but as an “investment” in the platform. The value goes straight into Trump-aligned infrastructure: ads, rallies, digital outreach, voter suppression efforts. No FEC oversight. No donation caps. No paper trail. Just digital scrip, pumped and dumped through a closed ecosystem where influence flows but accountability doesn’t. It’s the end of campaign finance law by way of branding.

Then there’s the human level—conversion scams and broker abuse, especially among those already cut out of traditional banking. Undocumented migrants, queer youth, disabled folks on public stipends—these are the people most likely to receive coin-based payments they can’t easily redeem for cash. Desperation breeds risk. So fake exchanges will flourish. Telegram channels promising “instant cashouts.” Apps mimicking legitimate redemption platforms. Brokers offering “cash for coins” at predatory rates. Someone offers you $80 for $100 in coin and disappears. Someone else fakes a UI, captures your private key, and drains your wallet. These won’t be isolated incidents. They’ll be systemic side-effects of a coercive architecture that pushes people into coin economies with no on-ramps out. And without strong consumer protections or federal oversight—which the GENIUS Act doesn’t guarantee—you’ll have no recourse. Just a locked wallet and a warning not to trust the wrong person next time.

But perhaps the most insidious use of coin-based systems will be institutional discipline through programmable restrictions. If you rely on school stipends, work-study pay, or aid from a public institution, your money may soon come with strings—not figuratively, but in code. Spend it here, not there. Use it by this date, or it expires. Buy only “approved” items. Fail to meet attendance metrics or behaviour policies? Your access gets throttled. Miss a paperwork deadline? Your balance is frozen. This isn’t conspiracy thinking—it’s exactly what programmable money is built to do. And the power it grants institutions is terrifying. You’re no longer a recipient of funds. You’re a behavioural output waiting to be corrected. And because it’s all automated, there’s no one to negotiate with, no one to plead your case. The system doesn’t need to explain itself. It just silently enforces your compliance, one blocked transaction at a time.

This isn’t money. It’s control infrastructure. And the more vulnerable you are—economically, politically, socially—the tighter that control becomes. The GENIUS Act doesn’t just authorise new forms of currency. It lays the groundwork for a world where access to value is conditional, compliance is enforced through spending limits, and punishment arrives not in court, but in your wallet. This is governance by currency—quiet, digital, and devastatingly effective.

There Is No Upside—Only Escape Routes

There’s no silver lining here. No hidden opportunity or “inclusive innovation” buried under the jargon. The GENIUS Act doesn’t offer anything resembling upside for the people most likely to be forced into its systems. There’s no relief in it—only extraction. No freedom—only conditional access. What it builds is a financial infrastructure that works precisely as designed: to enclose the poor, restrict their movement, and make every interaction a potential point of capture, compliance, or loss.

For those of us already living in the red—already dealing with withheld pay, gatekept services, and institutional hostility—this isn’t an upgrade. It’s a digitised trap. Coins will replace cash. Wallets will replace autonomy. The line between survival and punishment will be written in code, and revised without notice. And if you lose value in the process? That’s on you. Terms and conditions apply. The system won’t just take your labour. It’ll take your time, your privacy, your choices, and your dignity—and it will call the process “modernisation.”

And yet, in the cracks of all this, there are still ways to resist. Not because the system leaves space for resistance—it doesn’t—but because we’ve always had to build our own survival infrastructures anyway. Lightning wallets might offer temporary refuge—a way to store value outside of the platform coins, trade peer-to-peer, or escape surveillance. But they come with risk: price volatility, scams, the technical skill gap, and the legal grey zone of crypto use among the poor. Cash economies—mutual aid, bartering, informal support networks—will remain vital. They’ll be harder to sustain, more heavily policed, and increasingly pushed to the margins, but they are still ours. Still built on trust, reciprocity, and lived understanding, not code and compliance.

The most important thing we can do right now is understand the design. Recognise what this system is for, who it’s built to serve, and who it’s built to discipline. Refuse the framing. Don’t call it freedom. Don’t call it choice. Don’t fall for the bait of “convenience” when that convenience comes at the cost of autonomy. The more clearly we name it, the harder it becomes to justify. The more we build together outside of it—even if those systems are rough and vulnerable—the less hold it has over our futures.

This isn’t about keeping up.
It’s about refusing to play their game.
Because once we name the coin for what it is—a collar—we can begin to find each other again.
Not as users. Not as wallets.
As people. As kin. As survivors who will not be programmed.

What Comes Next—and What We Must Name

The GENIUS Act is almost certainly going to pass this summer. The Senate’s already cleared it, the House is poised to follow, and the White House—whoever’s in it—will sign off under the banner of “financial innovation” and “tech-forward regulation.” The headlines will be full of buzzwords: clarity, competition, consumer safety. The pundits will spin it as a win for American leadership in digital finance. The think tanks will crank out white papers. But for people like us—for the ones whose lives are already mediated by gatekeepers, paperwork, and algorithmic suspicion—this isn’t a step forward. It’s the codification of our containment.

This bill doesn’t just privatise currency. It privatises access to existence itself. To shelter, to care, to mobility, to autonomy. It creates a world where money doesn’t flow through your hands—it flows through platforms, conditions, and scoring systems you’ll never fully see. A world where your right to spend, save, or survive is determined not by law or dignity, but by whether you tick the right boxes in someone else’s code. It’s not just transactional. It’s totalising. And the only way to prepare for it is to do your own homework—now.

You have to look at your life, your dependencies, your pay routes. Where would a coin system be introduced first in your world? Is it your school, your employer, your aid programme, your rental assistance, your campus wallet? What part of your day is already digitised, already vulnerable to becoming a branded payment ecosystem? That’s where it’ll hit first. Not with fanfare, but with a quiet platform update. A changed button. A new policy. “We now issue your disbursement in…” That’s your warning bell. And you’ll need to sound it—to your friends, your neighbours, your kin, your chosen family.

Because this isn’t just about resisting a coin. It’s about refusing a worldview that reduces people to programmable behaviours. This goes way beyond owning the means of production. You can own the factory, the tools, the labour—and still be paid in tokens you can’t spend outside the factory walls. This is about owning the terms of access. It’s about deciding, together, that value isn’t just what the market says it is. That care, survival, and solidarity aren’t up for algorithmic negotiation. That we don’t accept coins with collars, no matter how smooth the UX or sleek the rollout.

We have to name what’s happening. Call it what it is. Not innovation. Not inclusion. But the birth of the algorithmic ghetto—a segmented, digitised economy where the poor live on locked scrip whilst the rich still spend cash. Where your life is mapped, priced, and sanctioned one transaction at a time. And if we don’t speak it plainly—if we don’t build our refusal into something visible, audible, and undeniable—it’ll roll over us, wrapped in the language of progress. It’s not enough to say no quietly. We have to build something louder. Something rooted. Something unprogrammable.

Final thoughts …

They’ll tell you this is the future. That it’s safer. More efficient. That coins backed by corporations are just as good—no, better—than government currency. They’ll promise you stability, transparency, innovation. They’ll say it’s just a wallet. Just a payment method. Just a way to keep things moving faster. But you’ll know, in your gut, in your daily grind, what it really is. It’s a collar.

Because what kind of future demands that you park your wages in ten different wallets just to live your life? One for your job, one for your school, one for your healthcare, one for your food benefits, one for your landlord, one for your platform gig, one for your child's IEP services, one for your “loyalty perks.” What kind of freedom is that? It’s not financial inclusion. It’s digital fragmentation, where each coin comes with a catch, each platform with a lock, and each “redeemable” dollar is just another form of delay, depreciation, or denial.

And whilst you scramble to make it work—to track your balances, wait out your holds, and fight for redemptions—they’re getting rich off your parked cash. Every coin you can’t access is a dollar they can leverage. They’ll reinvest, speculate, lend it out at interest. Build influence, fund campaigns, pad their margins. You carry the restriction; they carry the return. Like some dystopian twist on that old Jerry Reed song: they get the gold mine, and we get the shaft.

This isn’t a bug. It’s the business model.

You do not deserve a future where your survival is mediated through tokens.
Where your autonomy depends on a terms-of-service clause.
Where every dollar you earn arrives wrapped in someone else’s conditions.

We don’t need better scrip.
We need solidarity, refusal, and the right to live without asking.
Without approval. Without unlocking spending categories. Without gamifying our own compliance.

They’ll call it progress.
But we know better.
Because we’ve seen the mine. And we know where the shaft leads.