Coldie: Filthy Fiat, Slabbed and Certified
Coldie has had his mold-ruined Filthy Fiat dollar bills certified and slabbed by PMG, the latest turn in a project about the fragility of fiat money and its contrast with Bitcoin.
Coldie has had his Filthy Fiat dollar bills certified and slabbed. "Slabbed for eternity. Certified by the most respected currency authentication company PMG," he posted on September 25, calling it "The first art series to have deteriorated bills certified and cataloged." The slab he shared holds a torn, mold-stained 2013 one-dollar Federal Reserve Note from Kansas City, labeled "FILTHY FIAT BY COLDIE, 2025, S1."
The bills come from a box he buried. According to his site, in 2020, living in a wildfire-prone mountain town, Coldie buried two hundred one-dollar bills; two years later he dug them up and found the cash had become "a solid brick of mold." He turned the ruined notes into Filthy Fiat, a project about the fragility and debasement of fiat currency, and used the same bills for the facial features of his Warren Buffett portrait, the first of his kinetic magnetic portraits to sell at Christie's.
The series keeps circling Bitcoin. On October 1 he released Filthy Fiat Flag: BTC 2025, an 18 by 24 inch print in an edition of 21, built from scans of the buried bills in the style of the US flag with a Bitcoin logo. The same day he shared the stereoscopic 3D portrait of Ross Ulbricht he made for the History of Bitcoin book.
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