Economy featured

SMPLE-KOIN A Buddhist Cryptocurrency Optimised for Material Sufficiency within Game Theory Dynamics

By Samuel Alexander, originally published by The Simplicity Collective

January 13, 2026

bookcover

I’ve just published a short new book, SMPLE-KOIN: A Buddhist Cryptocurrency Optimised for Material Sufficiency within Game Theory Dynamics. I’ve posted the blurb below, and the pdf is available here (on a ‘pay what you want’ basis, just edit the price as you see fit). It’s also available on the major online book sellers if you’d prefer a paperback (although it’s only 34 pages long).

OVERVIEW:

SMPLE-KOIN is a hypothetical cryptocurrency inspired by Buddhism. It will be introduced in this essay as a spiritual ‘thought experiment’ with economic implications, one designed to facilitate a real-world revaluation of how important material and financial wealth is to human prosperity. The goal is to solve critical ‘coordination problems’ in game theory, and thereby facilitate a global transition to ‘simpler’ lifestyles of sustainable consumption which are supported by post-growth or degrowth economies. At the very least, this essay might help people walk the spiritual path of industrial civilization’s demise.

In order to elucidate the core thesis, a near-term future is envisioned in which civilization is shaped by an artificial superintelligence known as ‘Cholom’. This benevolent entity uses its superintelligence to create a value-system for humans to live by, optimising for peace and prosperity throughout the entire community of life. It will be seen that this holistic and rationalistic worldview ends up bearing a close resemblance to Buddhism. Since Cholom is aligned with human interests, it wants people to adopt this value system for their own sake – to realise their own peace and prosperity, now and into the deep future.

To facilitate this radical transformation in human life, Cholom creates a global cryptocurrency called SMPLE-KOIN, which is stored in digital repositories called Karmic Wallets. These wallets are assigned to each individual and only accessible on the internet via perfectly encrypted signatures. If your stock increases, you have advanced, to that extent, along ‘The Path’ toward enlightened living – and conversely. Accordingly, the goal in life is to become spiritually rich, as quantified by SMPLE-KOIN, the perfect unit of karmic accounting. In this essay, it is suggested that one of the most significant effects of SMPLE-KOIN is how it could revalue the importance of material and financial wealth to a well-lived life, an insight that is ancient but ever-new.

Might there be times when less really is more?

WARNING TO READER:

This irreverent essay explores a near-term future in which the Machine’s most dehumanising technology – artificial superintelligence – turns out to have a silver lining that redeems humanity’s spiritual condition in surprising ways. If the premise of this ‘thought experiment’ merely appals the reader, it can be safely assumed the point has been missed. One is invited to read between the sentences, which is to say, not merely to read what follows but also to help write the underlying message into existence.

Let us damn the Matrix together, in joyful and poetic revolt.

The pdf is available here (on a pay what you want basis, just edit the price as you see fit). Other books by Samuel Alexander are available here.

Teaser image credit: Author supplied.

Samuel Alexander

Dr. Samuel Alexander, co-director of the Simplicity Institute, is a lecturer at the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne, Australia, teaching a course called ‘Consumerism and the Growth Economy: Critical Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ into the Master of Environment. He is also a Research Fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. He is author of eighteen books, including Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary (2018), Art Against Empire: Toward an Aesthetics of Degrowth (2017), Just Enough is Plenty: Thoreau’s Alternative Economics (2016), Prosperous Descent: Crisis as Opportunity in an Age of Limits (2015), Sufficiency Economy: Enough, for Everyone, Forever (2015), and Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation (2013), and he is editor of Voluntary Simplicity: The Poetic Alternative to Consumer Culture (2009) and co-editor of Simple Living in History: Pioneers of the Deep Future (2014). A full publication list is available here.

As well as his academic work, in recent years Sam has been working on a ‘simpler way’ demonstration project which became the subject of a documentary, ‘A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity‘. He is also founder of the Simplicity Collective, a website and social network dedicated to exploring the relationships between voluntary simplicity, energy descent, and post-growth / degrowth economics.  Dr. Alexander’s PhD thesis, conducted through Melbourne Law School, is entitled “Property beyond Growth: Toward a Politics of Voluntary Simplicity”.

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