On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon announced that he had directed Treasury Secretary John Connally “to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold.” The suspension was never lifted. Fifty-five years later, on the same date, artist Lucho Poletti unveiled the first of ten drawings responding to that decree.

Europe had experienced its own monetary upheavals. Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder worked during an era of expanding banking, credit and speculation. Antwerp, where Bruegel worked, became one of Europe’s major commercial centers. Both painters populated their compositions with hundreds of figures, constructing elaborate worlds in which human behavior, social order and moral judgment could be examined simultaneously.

Bitcoin artists have increasingly returned to this visual tradition. Pepenardo’s Master Cuts Out the Stone, exhibited by the Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) earlier this year, reimagined Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s The Surgeon as a study of who extracts and who is extracted from. Carlijn Kingma’s The Waterworks of Money, shown at Bitcoin Amsterdam last year, depicted the modern monetary system as an interconnected landscape. Complex systems seem to invite images that hold everything in a single frame.

Poletti has made bitcoin-related art since 2017, describing his practice as visual propaganda for the monetary revolution. A contributor to the Bitcoin Conference art gallery since 2021, he is returning to Bitcoin Amsterdam this November with Ten Decrees.

The series reimagines ten paintings—four by Bosch and six by Bruegel—around money. Fiat, Latin for “let it be done,” is the organizing principle. Nine titles issue commands: let there be fury, profit, chaff, a game, folly, hunger, refuge, collapse and ash. The tenth, Ultima Fiat, reverses that authority: let it be the last.

Unveiled on August 15, 2026, the anniversary of Nixon’s announcement, the series follows a biweekly release schedule that began on August 29 and concludes on January 3, 2027, the anniversary of Bitcoin’s Genesis Block. Each drawing contains hundreds of figures and objects, with inscriptions often visible only at close range. The 30-by-20-inch prints are produced in editions of ten and form a composition spanning approximately four meters when arranged in two rows of five.

Five drawings have been released, most recently Fiat Moria, based on Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs, on October 24. The sixth, Fiat Fames, is scheduled to follow on November 7.

Ahead of Bitcoin Amsterdam, scheduled for November 5–6, I spoke with Poletti about the recurring influence of Bosch and Bruegel on bitcoin art, the relationship between allegory and propaganda, and the translation of his densely detailed drawings to the conference’s main-stage LED installation.

BMAG: Bosch and Bruegel seem to be having a synchronistic moment among artists interested in Bitcoin. Both worked in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, during a period when Antwerp was emerging as a major financial center and the Habsburgs were debasing coinage. What is it about transitional periods, such as the current one, that draws artists back to Bosch and Bruegel and their densely populated landscapes?

Lucho Poletti: Because they had already solved the problem I was stuck with: how do you draw a whole society going wrong at once? Bosch and Bruegel put hundreds of people in a single frame, each busy with their own concerns. The system shows up in the sum of it. You don’t look at a Bruegel, you search it. It’s a great way to depict the effects of money, which nobody really sees and everybody feels.

They also lived through a money problem a lot like ours. Silver from the Americas poured into Europe through Seville and on to the bankers in Antwerp. Prices across Western Europe rose sixfold over 150 years. Philip II defaulted in 1557, and the crash spread across Europe. Two years later, Bruegel painted Netherlandish Proverbs, a village where everyone is absorbed in something foolish and nobody can see the whole.

The four Bosch pieces are about appetite: the temptation and the bill that arrives afterward. The six Bruegels are about the crowd and how society behaves once the rules stop making sense.

BMAG: The series draws on the original meaning of the F-word every bitcoiner knows. Nine of your titles use fiat as a command, while the tenth, Ultima Fiat, appears to reverse that authority. How did you arrive at Latin as the language of the series, and why does the final decree change speaker?

Lucho Poletti: Fiat was never a noun. In Latin it’s a verb, “let it be done.” It’s the word God speaks in the Latin Genesis before the light comes on: fiat lux. Someone with authority says so and it happens. That’s a literal description of how fiat money comes into existence, so I wanted the verb in every title.

Latin wasn’t a stretch for me. I’ve titled work in it for years: Moneta Divina, Cypher Deos and Novus Moneta Seclorum, dating back to 2020. The dollar already speaks it, too. Turn over a one-dollar bill and there are three Latin mottos on the back. Ultima Fiat, Fiat Lucrum and Furia Fiat had their names before the series did. Once there were three decrees in concept, I kept going until I had ten, and the name for the whole series became obvious. Ten Decrees has the Ten Commandments sitting underneath it, which suits work rebuilt from painted sermons.

In Fiat Lucrum, there’s a lighthouse at the top left with FIAT LUX GENESIS 1:3 engraved into it. The title is the phrase rewritten for the money printers: let there be light becomes let there be profit.

Nine of the decrees are issued to you in the flat voice used by an institution. Let there be profit, let there be hunger, let there be a game. The tenth is the only one we get to say back. Ultima fiat means “let it be the last,” which is closer to a plea than an order. Every one of us has been living under the first nine since 1971, whether we noticed or not, and Bitcoin is how we issue the tenth. It closes the series on January 3, the anniversary of the Genesis Block, which also happens to be my birthday.

BMAG: Bosch and Bruegel constructed extraordinarily complex visual worlds where allegory, satire, religious symbolism and everyday life coexist. Their paintings invite close inspection but rarely offer a single, definitive interpretation. In Ten Decrees, you borrow their compositions while introducing a more explicit critique of the monetary system. How do you approach the relationship between ambiguity and message in your work?

Lucho Poletti: The words carry the message so the people don’t have to. Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights doesn’t have a single word in it. Fiat Lucrum has more than fifty lettered objects, and some are as blunt as a protest sign: four money presses labeled QE-1, QE-2, QE-3 and QE-∞, and a small hand-lettered card on a broker’s desk that reads genius, we print, you pay, have a nice day. Nobody has to wonder what I think of the money system.

I keep the ambiguity in the people. In Fiat Lucrum, there’s a crowd cheering a woman who holds up a $ on a golden staff under a sign that says ETF, and that crowd is wearing my mask. So is the man signing the leverage contract, and so is the woman taking the mortgage. In Fiat Palea, a masked man is knee-deep in a pile of printed bills. Bosch drew his own neighbors into the middle of the garden, and I drew mine. If the ₿ on a forehead were a badge of honor, I wouldn’t hand it out like that. It’s more a badge of the aware, the initiated. Knowing the money is broken doesn’t make one a saint.

I’m careful with endings, too. These pieces show the exit without promising a way out. Near the middle of Fiat Moria, there’s a lit doorway with MONEY ₿ BETTER WORLD over the arch, and a plain-faced man on the step looking back at the square. He hasn’t gone in yet, and nobody’s stopping him. Where you’d be standing in that picture is your call.

BMAG: In Fiat Lucrum, your reinterpretation of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, you introduce a system of waterworks: pipes, reservoirs and flowing liquidity. Bosch often allowed viewers to recognize things that the figures within his paintings could not. What possibilities does that kind of visual allegory offer when depicting something as abstract as the monetary system?

Lucho Poletti: What Bosch never had in his garden was plumbing, so I gave it some. Water organizes the whole of Fiat Lucrum. It starts clean high in the mountains on the left, pours out of a machine in Eden and settles in a reflecting basin. Cut into the basin’s wall is an inspection window with fish swimming behind the glass. Somebody built a viewing port into the reservoir so it could be checked, and every full node on the Bitcoin network is that window.

Downstream, the water widens into a lake. In the middle sits a glass tank labeled FRESH LIQUIDITY, with BOTTOMLESS engraved on the bowl, and eight people are having the party of their lives inside it. The valve wheel controlling the flow is on top of the dome, outside the glass, where none of them can reach it. Monetary policy is set by someone who isn’t at the party. And the tank leaks.

From there, the water runs orange down a stream and over a waterfall into a pool, where a tick with a $ on its cheek drinks it through a hose. That’s the Bosch trick you’re describing. The bathers can’t see the leak or the valve, while you can see both from across the room. Richard Cantillon worked out around 1730 that new money helps whoever gets it first and costs whoever gets it last. I drew it as a watercourse because everybody already understands water: whoever’s upstream drinks first, and everyone downstream gets what’s left.

BMAG: Looking across the series, are there particular details, references or artistic decisions that you feel are especially important but might be overlooked by viewers? What would you want someone encountering these drawings for the first time to spend more time looking at?

Lucho Poletti: Up close is where these work, and most of what matters in them is small.

Start with the plain faces. Everybody spots the Satoshi masks and the $ skulls first because they’re the loud ones, but the plain faces belong to the people the system is happening to. In Furia Fiat, a line of bald men crawl on their hands and knees with red tubes plugged into the backs of their skulls. The red is the same color as the fluid in a bowl a few meters away that says TIME. That’s what’s being drained out of them.

In Fiat Palea, Adam and Eve stand under a serpent with a $ for an eye. They’re wearing the mask, but neither of them has a ₿ on the brow yet.

Then look at how characters connect across a distance. In Fiat Ludus, a sack labeled STIMULUS sits on a bench next to an older figure, and a little way off a child walks away with the same sack on his back, labeled THE BILL. A blindfolded boy feels around with his arms out while the man lunging in beside him holds up a bunch of $ balloons the boy cannot see. Even the enrollment forms are signed by Seymore Debt and Max D. Out.

In Fiat Palea, a broken crate stenciled EXECUTIVE ORDER 6102 sits in the straw. Farther back, bolted across a vault, a plate reads WINDOW, NO REDEMPTION. Roosevelt took the gold in 1933 and Nixon closed the window in 1971, and I put the two close enough that you read one and then find the other. Higher in the same piece, a masked man with WHOOPS across his vest pours gasoline on a burning bank.

In Furia Fiat, the $ skulls stand on GNOSIS and clutch books of knowledge, keeping them for themselves. The bubbles are dated. Fiat Ludus has a sphere with tulips growing out of the top, marked 1637 and 1720, and another with a hen sitting on a WALL STREET egg, marked 1929 and 2008. Variety’s front page the day after the 1929 crash read WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG. Some of the skies have thin, straight lines of cloud behind the smoke, the kind left by a plane.

Watch the prices, too. A price in dollars only goes up: at CANTILLON’S hot dog stand in Fiat Ludus, the 5¢ is crossed out and the sign says $9. A price in sats only goes down: a fish stall in Fiat Moria has 4000 crossed out, then 2000, and now it’s 1000 SATS. In Fiat Ludus, the carrots changing hands have dropped from 7,500 to 3,000 SATS on the chalkboard next to the dollar hopscotch.

The Latin is there to be read. MORITURI TE SALUTANT, “those who are about to die salute you,” is carved around the rim of the arena in Fiat Ludus. EX NIHILO, “out of nothing,” is cut over an empty vault in Fiat Palea. In Fiat Moria, the $ skull leaning out of the window has a plaque on either side: MUNDUS VULT DECIPI, “the world wants to be deceived,” and $TULTORUM INFINITUS EST NUMERUS, “the number of fools is infinite,” with a $ replacing the S.

Fiat Lucrum has a small panel that runs a whole life through four stops: school, debt, work, death. In Fiat Moria, there’s a small round time machine with NO RETURN on its side and 1944–2026 on the dial. A man is climbing out of it, staring at the village. 1944 is Bretton Woods, when the world tied its money to the dollar and the dollar to gold. He left then and has only just arrived, and he can’t quite believe what he’s looking at.

None of that comes with a caption. You find it by standing close for a long time, the way you would with a Bruegel, and the finding is the whole point.

BMAG: Each drawing is 18,000 pixels wide and populated by hundreds of figures, with every Satoshi mask drawn by hand and details that only reveal themselves up close. You’ve described the work as “crafted, not generated.” At a time when AI can convincingly imitate the Old Masters, what significance does that labor have for you, and how does it shape the way you want these works to be experienced?

Lucho Poletti: “Crafted, not generated” is a phrase I came up with to sum up where the work in these pieces actually is. There are machines in my process, but they’re only one part of it. A model I trained on years of my own work does the rough first pass on a composition. I think of it as an apprentice.

Bosch came out of a family workshop, and the masters of his day relied on assistants for the groundwork so their own hours could go into the meaning. Mine roughs out the scene and gives me a base to build toward the standard they set. Then I spend weeks on each piece in a grueling manual process in Photoshop, making decisions and drawing hundreds of figures, objects, symbols and phrases until the art says what I mean.

AI can imitate the look of a Bosch or a Bruegel quite convincingly now. What it can’t do is mean anything. It won’t decide that the valve on the liquidity tank in Fiat Lucrum belongs outside the glass, where the bathers can’t reach it. It won’t decide that the slop on the ground should be piggy banks wired into the money presses, each with its own name: SAVINGS, PENSION, NEST EGG.

It doesn’t make jokes, either. It’s never going to sit a fool in a jester’s cap on a platform labeled TAKE IT AT FACE VALUE while a $ skull does his makeup. My personal philosophy is that if I don’t do the majority of the work, it’s not my art. I hold myself to that, and anyone who looks at these up close can see that a person made the decisions that matter.

That’s how I’d like people to take these in: up close and for a long time. I don’t ask anyone to trust me on how they were made. The work answers that better than I can.

BMAG: You’ve been part of the Bitcoin Conference since 2021, and this November Ten Decrees comes to the main stage at Bitcoin Amsterdam, not far from the historical centers where Bosch and Bruegel worked. These drawings are extraordinarily detailed and designed to reward close inspection. How are you approaching their translation to monumental LED screens, and does exhibiting them in the Netherlands carry any particular significance for you?

Lucho Poletti: The prints were meant for one person standing close to search the work and find details that speak to them. An LED wall gets a thousand people at fifty meters, which is an amazing opportunity to create a visual experience for the still pieces, so I’ve done my best to create a compelling one for each piece.

Each one gets fifteen seconds, in the order in which they were released. The large center wall carries the center of each piece in one slow pass from left to right, so the room gets its shape. The screen on the right opens on the Bosch or Bruegel it came from, with its name and date, and halfway through it wipes across to mine. The screen on the left pulls out lateral details viewers would never catch from the floor, such as the ship of fools riding the mast in Fiat Moria or the pigs feeding at the DEBASED trough. All five released so far play back to back as one loop, with the Old Master and new money side by side throughout.

The Netherlands matters to me. Bosch spent his whole life in ’s-Hertogenbosch, about an hour south of Amsterdam by train. Some of Bruegel’s proverbs are still used in Dutch. People still say someone hangs his cloak to the wind when he turns with the crowd. In Fiat Moria, a man wearing a Satoshi mask jumps off a mountain while holding his cloak in his hand—a reference to the Dutch proverb about changing one’s position to suit the prevailing winds.

Amsterdam has its own chapter in this story. The Bank of Amsterdam opened in 1609 to give merchants a money nobody could debase. For more than a century, its bank guilder traded at a premium over ordinary coin because people trusted that the silver was in the vault. David Hume held it up as the model of a fully backed bank.

The bank had been lending quietly to the Dutch East India Company. When that became public in 1790, the premium vanished and the bank declared itself insolvent. I can’t think of a better city to show a series about monetary decrees and trust, two months before the final piece lands on the Genesis Block anniversary.

Lucho Poletti’s Ten Decrees will be on view on the main stage at Bitcoin Amsterdam on November 5–6, 2026, as part of the Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery programming. The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery organizes international exhibitions, auctions and artist collaborations exploring bitcoin and its cultural implications.

This article first appeared in Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Dennis Koch. Source: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/ten-decrees-old-masters-new-money