Thomas Bollen, the investigative financial journalist behind the Waterworks of Money project, will speak on two panels at Bitcoin Amsterdam on November 5-6. The project, a collaboration with artist Carlijn Kingma and monetary researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden, maps the financial system as a network of reservoirs, channels, and pumps — and one of its scenarios asks whether bitcoin challenges that architecture or gets absorbed into it.
A drawing built from 100 interviews
The project took two years of research. The team interviewed more than 100 people across banking, government, academia, and monetary reform circles. Kingma then spent over 2,200 hours turning that material into an intricate architectural landscape. It's not a chart. It's a drawing of the plumbing.
Bollen's takeaway from all those conversations is blunt: people inside the system know their own corner well, but very few can see the whole machine. "Many people inside the financial system know a great deal about their own corner but very few can oversee the larger system," he said.
The loan that creates money
One finding stands out. During the research, the team spoke with many bankers — including the CEO of a major bank — who didn't know they worked for a money-creating institution. That's not a small gap. Banks create new money when they issue loans; they don't just shuffle depositors' savings around. Bollen says many economics textbooks still get this wrong, and that economics education barely touches it.
The confusion has institutional backing. In 2022, the Riksbank's prize in economics went to research that presents banks as mere intermediaries. A prestigious award reinforcing a flawed model, in Bollen's telling, doesn't help.
Cheap credit and the inequality question
Bollen is careful about numbers here. He says it's impossible to put a precise figure on how much inequality comes from the design of the monetary system. But he's clear on the direction: the money system exacerbated inequality enormously during the years when credit was extremely cheap.
The mechanism is familiar to anyone who watched asset prices through the 2010s. Cheap credit for wealthy people and large multinationals pushed up shares and houses, producing asset inflation that benefited those households and firms more than everyone else. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, put the underlying condition plainly in 2019: "Money is free for those who are creditworthy."
Where bitcoin fits
The project's bitcoin scenario doesn't resolve the question it poses. It examines whether bitcoin disrupts existing financial power structures or becomes part of them — a framing that lands differently at a conference full of people who would answer that question with confidence. Bollen's panels are scheduled for November 5-6. The Waterworks of Money drawing itself remains the argument: a system that most participants can't see whole, rendered in one image they can.
