A 2,200-Hour Map of Money Puts Bitcoin's Institutional Turn on Trial
A Dutch artist, a financial journalist, and a monetary researcher spent two years and 2,200 hours drawing the plumbing of the financial system. Their conclusion about bitcoin's institutional embrace isn't flattering, and it lands in Amsterdam on Nov. 6.
Two years of research. More than 100 interviews. And 2,200 hours of pen work by Dutch artist Carlijn Kingma.
That's the ledger behind The Waterworks of Money, a drawing and animated series that renders the financial system as reservoirs, pumps, and canals. Some basins sit flooded with liquidity. Others stay bone dry. Kingma built the project with investigative journalist Thomas Bollen and monetary researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden, and Bollen takes the Treasury Stage at Bitcoin Amsterdam on Nov. 6, 2026, for two panels, one at 11:00 a.m. on Europe's monetary history and another at 1:55 p.m. on how much government the money supply actually needs.
The finding that should unsettle anyone in crypto is boring and enormous at once. Banks create new money when they lend. They aren't intermediaries passing along depositors' savings. Bollen says the team interviewed a CEO of a major bank who didn't know he ran a money-creating institution. The result was a specific kind of inflation: cheap credit for the creditworthy pushed up shares and houses while wages lagged behind. Ray Dalio said it plainly in 2019, "Money is free for those who are creditworthy."
So where does bitcoin land? Van der Linden is blunt about it. Bitcoin as an asset has benefited from institutional money, but that same shift has compromised its promise as an alternative payment rail. Banks are moving anyway, notably with Wero, the payment wallet a group of European lenders launched in 2024. That's a payments upgrade, not structural reform.
The precedent here's important. Amsterdam's Wisselbank opened in 1609 as a full reserve institution, every guilder backed by coin in the vault, and it failed after quietly lending to the Dutch East India Company. Bollen sees the same arc in crypto. Firms lent out customer bitcoin while showing balances on screen. FTX is what that looks like when it breaks.
Reading between the lines, the real asymmetry is the safety net. In 2023, Washington guaranteed every SVB deposit, including the more than 90 percent sitting above the insured limit, and Switzerland backstopped UBS's rescue of Credit Suisse. Banks get that backstop. Bitcoin holders don't, and from a compliance standpoint that's the whole argument in one line. Watch the Wero adoption numbers, not the panel talk.