I recently came across an interesting economics question—if printing money is so simple, why doesn’t every country do it? It reminded me of the story of Zimbabwe, and the secret behind the United States printing money.

First, let’s talk about a simple logic. If you print a sheet of paper yourself, put your ancestors’ portraits on it, write “This is worth 100 dollars,” and then take it to buy things, no one will pay any attention. But if Americans do the same thing, the whole world accepts it. Why? Because the United States is the strongest, and the world trusts the dollar.

After World War II, the world turned into one big village. Russia produces hammers, the United States produces machines, China makes clothing, and Vietnam grows rice. Since countries need to buy and sell with each other, they need a unified instrument for transactions. Gold is too heavy and too inconvenient. So Americans stepped forward and said: Use the dollars I print—I guarantee they’re pegged to gold. From that point on, the dollar became the globally used currency.

This is why U.S. money printing works—because the dollar is an international hard currency. If other countries print their own money, nobody wants it. If you need to import goods, you have to use dollars. What if you don’t have dollars? Then you can only borrow, or earn dollars by exporting. This is also why countries all need to accumulate foreign exchange reserves.

But this system has a fatal flaw. I think of Mugabe in Zimbabwe. He studied a lot, with a master’s degree in law and public administration from a British university. When Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, the country was actually doing pretty well—high levels of industrialization, and a diversified economic structure. But in 1997, when veterans demanded subsidies, Mugabe came up with a “brilliant idea”—printing money.

What happened? The more money was printed, the faster prices kept rising. Money you could use to buy pants in the morning was only enough to buy underwear by the afternoon. By 2008, the inflation rate reached 220,000%. In the end, people had to haul money around just to buy a loaf of bread. That’s the outcome of unlimited money printing.

At its core, money is a commodity, and its value is determined by supply and demand. If the supply is too high, the value falls. Printing money is like raising chickens to lay eggs: if production is too high, the price will inevitably collapse. The story of Zimbabwe is a vivid lesson.

So why is the United States still printing money? Because the United States has a special status. The process of U.S. money printing goes like this: the Federal Reserve prints money → then spends it through defense, public spending, and other channels → dollars flow around the world to purchase goods and resources → other countries use dollars to buy American goods or assets → the dollars flow back to the United States. This is called “quantitative easing.”

But the United States also can’t print infinitely. If it prints too much, the dollar will depreciate, global inflation will rise, and the United States will get hurt as well. So the United States prints money only within the range of inflation that the global economy can tolerate. Ironically, despite holding the power to print money, the United States is the country with the highest level of debt in the world. That’s the real truth behind the U.S. money-printing game.

Looking at these histories, I increasingly understand why some people want decentralized currencies. In the traditional financial system, whoever controls the power to print money also controls the discourse on how wealth is distributed. That’s also why, lately, I’ve been paying more attention to decentralized assets—on platforms like Gate, I want to see whether there’s any opportunity.