A Better Way to Honor Harriet Tubman: Cryptocurrency

The U.S. Treasury Is Too Slow to Ride the Underground Railroad

Fugitive slave Harriet Tubman went back to slave-holding territory 19 times after Congress passed The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In total, she brought 300 slaves to their freedom before The Civil War. Thus, many of Tubman’s contemporaries considered her, “The Moses of her people.”

Of course, the federal prosecutors of the day likely would’ve thrown the book at Tubman. Rewards for her capture totaled to $40,000—equivalent to over $1 million today (adjusted for inflation and the Consumer Price Index).

To call Tubman ahead of her time is an understatement. The Republican Party wasn’t formed until February 28, 1854 (specifically to oppose the expansion of slavery). The Supreme Court decided Dred Scott in 1857, and Abraham Lincoln was elected president in the 4-way race of 1860. Although some states seceded earlier, the Confederacy formed February 8, 1861, less than a month before Lincoln’s inauguration. So, for over a decade before the Civil War and the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Tubman risked life and limb to help others gain freedom.


Following the war, Tubman continued outpacing her times. She established her residence as The Home for Indigent and Aged Negroes and she advocated for women’s suffrage. She died in 1913, around age 90, about 7 years before The Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote.

The U.S. government—in stark contrast—hasn’t been nearly as timely in paying proper respect to Tubman. As The Encyclopedia Britannica noted in 2005, Tubman, “spent her last years in poverty. Not until 30 years after the war was she granted a government pension in recognition of her work for the [Union’s] Federal Army.”

Then, the U.S. Postal Service waited until 1978—some 65 years after Tubman’s death—to issue a postage stamp in her honor.

The 32-cent Harriet Tubman U.S. postage stamp was issued in 1978, sixty-five years after Tubman’s death; eBay

A new $20 bill bearing Tubman’s image was originally slated to enter circulation today, on the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. But, as Mr. Deroy Murdock noted here, as well as in the February 2020 print edition of Newsmax, the U.S. Treasury Department cited difficulties with anti-counterfeiting measures and delayed its debut until as early as 2026—long after President Trump leaves office and 113 years after Tubman’s death.


As Mr. Murdock rightly noted, Tubman’s legacy deserves to stand on its own, free from the baggage of replacing another historical figure on a bill.


Thus, creating a new denomination is untenable. And—to put it mildly after the previous delays—waiting until 2026 to honor Tubman would be unseemly.

So what’s the solution?



Further, even if Tubman replaced George Washington on the U.S. quarter, he’d still have the $1 bill. So, perhaps he could spare a denomination, unlike other historical figures.

The quarter is also ubiquitous and therefore prominent—at least for now. But coins are increasingly getting the cold shoulder as wages and prices rise. Surely the foreword-thinking and courageous Harriet Tubman deserves a larger denomination too, and not a coin that may soon go the way of the dinosaur. (As Mr. Murdock further noted, Tubman’s $25 bill would be $5 larger than Jackson’s twenty.)



Moreover, even if a spot could be made for Tubman somewhere on our physical currency, similar problems would persist for other historical figures who remain overdue and passed-over by the Treasury Department. People will ask, “What about Teddy Roosevelt?” (Or Martin Luther King Jr., F.D.R., Reagan, J.F.K., Eisenhower, and other notables who remain un-noted.) Tubman should lead the way for them too, out of this D.C.-based quagmire of inaction and half-measures, just as she did on the underground railroad.




Foremost, perhaps, is liquidity (it’s easiest to trade bitcoins because more people have them and want them), followed by existing infrastructure (it’s easiest to trade bitcoins because more people and businesses are setup to use them). Bitcoin further enjoys the widest brand recognition, and, perhaps, the most trust. It also has the less-obvious merits of resiliency (it’s less likely bad events would entirely eliminate the supply and demand for bitcoin) and being the best tested (any catastrophic failure likely would’ve happened already). The continuing speed of bitcoin’s adoption is also the fastest, and as a result its value will continue stabilizing.

Despite its daily fluctuations, critics of bitcoin’s current and past volatility may note (or lament) that each 100 dollars invested in bitcoin a decade ago is now worth $9.2 million.

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From another angle, critics of deficits, The Federal Reserve, and fiat currencies (read: inflatable money) note that nobody—not even the government—can simply print more cryptocurrency. Creating (or “mining”) bitcoins takes time, computing power, electricity, Internet access, and coordination. In short, like the gold standard, cryptocurrency can keep the Fed honest—so perhaps it’s no wonder the Fed seems loathe to the concept.

But cryptocurrencies have a happy problem with denominations—one Tubman could solve 107 years after her death: An individual bitcoin, commonly written 1 BTC, is growing so valuable that most consumer transactions use smaller and smaller fractions of 1 BTC. It’s like reverse-inflation, and it’s gone from the point over a decade ago when 1 BTC was worth less than a dollar, to today, with prices of everyday items commonly written in mBTC, or thousandths of a bitcoin (1000 mBTC = 1 BTC).

Coupled with this, it’s difficult for bitcoin owners to stay abreast of the true value of their digital wallets. Someone who purchased 1 BTC a decade ago for $0.39 and held it all this time would still see the same 1 BTC in her digital wallet today, although it’s now worth $11,789.55, about 30,229 times more. Thus, most bitcoin owners use the conversion rates between the BTC and their national currencies to appraise their bitcoins. This defeats one of bitcoin’s core advantages by forcing its owners to value it in terms of easily-manipulated government currencies with neither intrinsic worth nor scarcity.

In short, prices of goods and services continue to be anchored to fiat currencies instead of any truly-meaningful measure of buying power (for example, the McDonald’s Dollar Menu). And bitcoin is far from such common acceptance (as yet there’s no 0.1-mBTC Menu at any fast-food chain).

The American businesses that do accept bitcoins tend to set prices in dollars and float prices in BTC using the conversion rate. For example, if a hotel room costs $100/night and the conversion rate goes from $1 per mBTC to $1.01 per mBTC over the course of an afternoon (a 1-percent change), then a customer who uses BTC to book a room earlier in the afternoon would spend 100 mBTC, slightly more than a later customer who spends about 99 mBTC to book an identical room.

The hotel owner, meanwhile, likely immediately traded the BTC from both transactions for dollars—as do most businesses that accept bitcoin. In the process, though, the owner first missed out on the percentage-point gain in BTC that followed the earlier transaction, then he accepted a lower price for the second transaction than if the room’s rate had been set in BTC, and finally he missed out on any future gains in BTC after the second transaction.



Yet, today’s businesses continue trying to ascend the downward escalator while the federal debt and deficits soar and the Federal Reserve devalues the dollar, literally manufacturing trillions from thin air. In contrast, no central bank can change the scarcity of the BTC.

But where does Harriet Tubman fit into this?

New denominations of value—and not currency—are needed to represent true buying power. One such unit should be the Tubman.

These units must be anchored to a worldwide index that averages the values of every commonly-traded real commodity, e.g. gold, silver, crude oil, diamonds, platinum, timber, etc. This would factor out the so-called “value” of the fiat currencies and proportionalize the impact of price changes in any one commodity or market.






Further, since this concept is digital, it can be “localized,” as computer programmers say. This is vital to spurring adoption—and thereby also accountability—on an international level. “Localization” means software in the United States can label the unit the “Tubman” while software in the United Kingdom can call it the “Churchill.” And for another example, software in France could call it a “de Gaulle.”

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Computers, in such an example, would know a Tubman, a Churchill, and a de Gaulle are all the same and the local labels wouldn’t matter. When an American and a Brit trade, there would be no need for the American to know that on the other side of the pond the same unit is called a Churchill, or vice versa.

Some morning in the not-too-distant future, when the Federal Reserve Bank and the Bank of England have coordinated on some unfortunate and misguided monetary policy, an American might wake up, check her bitcoin wallet, and note, “Wow, the Tubman really outdid the dollar yesterday.”

Meanwhile, her British counterpart may check her bitcoin wallet and say, “The Churchill is doing bloody great against the pound!”


Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland, not far from the nation’s capital. She was originally named Araminta Ross, but she became known by her mother’s first name: Harriet. In 1844, she married a free African-American named John Tubman, taking his surname.





If The Treasury Department isn’t ready to honor Tubman, then it’s only fitting her name carry on in a manner that increases public scrutiny of both the department and the Federal Reserve—which has been anything but reserved in devaluing the U.S. dollar and the life savings of generations of Americans.


13 thoughts on “A Better Way to Honor Harriet Tubman: Cryptocurrency





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