Why I build a Money Machine

"What is your money’s job?"

We are used to answering that question about ourselves:
What do you do? What is your role, your work, your purpose?

But we rarely ask it of our money. We treat money as a tool, a resource, a source of anxiety, but not as something with a job description. And yet: if you hold any money, you are already making decisions about how part of the economy is directed. Through spending, saving, investing, you are shaping outcomes, often without much visibility into how or why.

I have spent close to a decade working in finance, from research to trading, and I have seen how powerful, yet opaque, many of these decisions can be.
But I have also seen how little we ask the deeper questions:

• What are we actually doing when we "put our money to work"?
• Can we make that process more understandable, deliberate, and aligned with our goals?
• And eventually: what kind of actor do we want our money to be in the world?

This project is my way of answering those questions, not in the abstract, but by building a system that makes those decisions visible, testable, and better over time. At the core of it is something I call the money machine: a structure for reasoning about money, automating parts of its job, and gaining confidence in how we use it.

But to understand what I mean by building a money machine, we have to dig deeper and first get a proper understanding of what Money (with capital M) is.

One of the most accessible, yet comprehensive, descriptions I have come across comes from Felix Martin, in his 2013 book: "Money | The Unauthorised Biography" [1]. I am reproducing his points in my own words below, but would urge everybody to read the book.

Many of us are used to thinking of money as coins, notes, or numbers in a bank account and of money in general as a medium for exchanging goods and services: money as a special good we all agreed to use as exchange and store of value, like silver, gold, etc. But these are just at the surface of something deeper: a framework for recording, measuring, and transferring debts between people.

Money is something much more fundamental: it is a social technology, an institution, a power structure, a way to organise society and economic activity.

It consists of three major ingredients, which together unlock its power:

The first is a system of account-keeping (a ledger), to track obligations, to track who owes what to whom, to track debt. Money originates not from bartering or coins, but from ledgers, long before physical tokens, there were systems for logging obligations. This could be a clay tablet, a modern banking database, or a double-entry spreadsheet. The core idea is that money lives in the record, not in the token. So in this sense, Money is a record of a debt, of an I owe you (IOU) in a system of record keeping.

The second ingredient is transferability of these obligations: When the right to be repaid the debt or obligation can change hands. In simple debt, person A owes person B. But if person B can pass that IOU to person C, who can then redeem it from A, the obligation becomes liquid. Now it is tradable. Now it circulates. Now it is money. Money allows obligations to be portable, to function even when the original parties are gone, or unknown.

The final ingredient is the introduction of a universal unit of accounting: This is the idea that all economic obligations can be measured using a common unit, like dollars, euros, or gold weights. That unit is not valuable in itself. It is a symbol, a way to quantify what is owed or promised, regardless of whether it is time, goods, labour, or risk. Without a shared denominator, trade becomes guesswork. With one, we can make obligations comparable, divisible, and exchangeable.

Once we understand that money is not a thing but a system, a record of obligations, made transferable, denominated in a common unit, a few key consequences follow:

First, it shows that money is always political.
It reflects not just economic activity, but a system of permissions and legitimacy:

• Who is allowed to create money?
• Whose debts are recognized?
• What counts as value?

These are political decisions, built into the structure of institutions like banks, central banks, payment systems, and capital markets. Many of these decisions have been removed from political discourse and are presented as technically optimal solutions, without alternative. Reclaiming Money, the system, as a core subject of political debate is to reclaim agency.

Second, it becomes clear that money is a form of power.
To hold money is to hold a claim on someone else’s future work. It is not just potential spending, it is potential direction. Money determines what gets built, who gets hired, what resources move, and where they go.

Every time you earn, save, spend, invest, or donate, you are exercising some of that power, to shape what work gets done, by whom, and for whose benefit. In addition to your personal potential for work, your skills, your time, your attention, you are holding some portion of Money's potential as well. So the real question to answer, when interacting with the Money system is: What is your Money's job? What should your Money do for you? for others?

For most people, money does not have a clearly defined job, at least not one they have consciously assigned. Instead, it is treated more like a background element in life: something to acquire, hold onto, and worry about. It moves through a familiar loop:

You earn it through your work.
You spend it on your needs, pleasures, and responsibilities.
You try to save a little.
Maybe you invest passively in a fund or pension plan, often without really knowing how it works.
And then you hope that, over time, it will quietly grow, and give you options later.

In this default mode, your money’s job is vague and reactive. It is meant to provide safety. To reduce anxiety. To buy back time, eventually, if all goes well.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But it is narrow. And more importantly, it is almost always unexamined. This setup treats money like a battery, something to be recharged through labour and drained through consumption. It assumes your role is to generate energy, and money’s role is simply to store it.

But money is more than stored labour. It is a claim on the future. A power to shape outcomes. And in the default model, that power mostly lies dormant.

What if your money’s job was not just to sit still?
What if it had an active role: to think with you, to work for you, to reflect the way you want to engage with the Money system and the world in general?

What if your money:

• Helped you reason about uncertainty?
• Took structured, intentional positions in markets?
• Supported others through targeted, thoughtful giving?
• Backed causes you believe in, not just companies in a default index?
• Helped you build real, resilient freedom, not just theoretical financial independence?

In that world, money is not just what sits in your account. It becomes a strategic actor, part of a deliberate system for decision-making, learning, and impact.

But to get there, you need more than a budgeting app. You need a way of thinking and a structure that turns that thinking into process. That is what I mean when I talk about building a money machine: A system for engaging deliberately with money: modular, inspectable, automated, built to reflect your thinking, values, and constraints. And the clarity from building the money machine enables something more: an informed, political engagement with how money works, who it serves, and how it could be different.

Not everyone’s money machine will, or should, look like mine.

Because money is a universal measure, it allows us to compare value across very different contexts: a bond portfolio, a bottle of milk, a freelance hour, or a donation. But the way we engage with Money is deeply personal. It depends on who we are, where we come from, and where we want to go.

If you are early in your career, without the privilege of inheritance or capital reserves, the best return on your effort might not come from investing at all. It might come from investing in yourself: building skills, acquiring knowledge, exploring career paths, and developing the resilience to navigate uncertainty.

That is still part of a money machine, just one with a different focus. Your machine might prioritise clarity in budgeting, values-aligned spending, or structured saving. You might want tools that help you build good habits, compare service providers, monitor your financial well-being, or even just reduce anxiety by making your financial reality legible. All of that counts. Because at its core, building a money machine is not about mimicking mine, it is about building a system that reflects your values, your constraints, and your agency.

My own money machine has a specific emphasis: how to make good decisions about capital.

I have already spent decades building my own capacity: studying, working, learning, and accumulating some financial capital. Now, the question that matters most to me is: what should my money do?

I focus on:

• Building tools to help me make and test trading decisions
• Structuring my portfolio to align with risk, opportunity, and personal values
• Using models to make complexity tractable, not overwhelming
• Treating money not just as a store of value, but as a co-worker in value creation

And I want this process to reflect not just efficiency, but ethics: A non-extractive, civic-minded stance toward investing and financial power.

This project is not a single product, it is an evolving system, built in public.

I will be publishing different types of posts:

• Essays on money, risk, agency, complexity, and systemic power
• Build logs from the technical components: code, infrastructure, design decisions
• Conceptual explainers that clarify core ideas behind finance and trading
• Reflections on working solo, building coherently, and thinking in public
• And eventually, tools that others might use or adapt as they build their own machines

Whether you are building your own system, challenge mine, or just think alongside it, welcome to the project.

[1] Felix Martin, Money, The Unauthorised Biography, 2013, Vintage, Random House, London, ISBN: 978-0-09957-852-9