This is the dumbest post I have ever written. You have been warned.

Bitcoin except videos of cats are money. — Left Outside (@leftoutside) August 20, 2014

Isn’t one pet-meme cryptocurrency enough? RT @leftoutside Bitcoin except videos of cats are money. — Squarely Rooted (@squarelyrooted) August 20, 2014

@squarelyrooted no I mean we exchange credits and debits to a access to cat videos. A cat standard. — Left Outside (@leftoutside) August 20, 2014

I found that last bit…intriguing. Backing our currency with cat videos would, of course, be very difficult to work (backing a currency with something whose marginal cost of replication of zero is probably not a recipe for stability)…but what if we backed our currency with actual cats?

The biggest question to answer is ‘how many cats would the government need to hold in reserve to make the standard work?’ So I went back to look at how much gold the government had when it had a gold standard, and then, in need of a denominator, indexed it as a ratio to national income (using Piketty & Zucman’s data).

Rather than over-analyze the data, I just took the average value of all the individual year values, came up with 1.98%, and multiplied that by national income today (just over $14.5 trillion) to estimate that the government would need to hold in reserve $288.7 billion in cats to maintain a cat standard.

This means we have a problem. The Humane Society estimates that there are 95.6 million owned cats in America, and that there are another 30-40 million stray or feral cats. That means an outside estimate of ~135 million cats in the United States. Which means even if the government eminently domained every living cat in America, that would still imply a valuation of over $2,000 per cat, which is an order of magnitude more than the current market price. This would, among other things, be highly disruptive to the cat market. It would also be hard to sustain, since rescue cats are largely sold by non-profits at the marginal cost of vaccinations, microchipping, etc.

So what the government needs to do is breed cats. Lots of cats.

Assuming we’re not talking about a purebred standard, the kind of cats the government might be keeping in reserve would probably have a market value of around $100/each, which means we would need the government to hold, in reserve, twenty times as many cats as exists in the United States today – 2.7 billion cats. Firstly, that could take a little time – depending on how large a cat base the government started with (presumably they wouldn’t catnap every cat in America), as long as a decade. This is not the insurmountable obstacle, though.

Land is.

Cats, by nature, are kind of territorial.

One study, in fact, shows a leading cause of death for outdoor cats is…other cats. Meouch.

That same study showed that outdoor cats have quite a substantial home range – as large as 1351 acres, though the average is just 4.9 acres. Even applying that average across the board, to 2.7 billion cats that gets you to 20.7 billion square miles – over a third of all the land area on Earth.

So let’s assume substantial overlap – even if you assume 100 cats per home range, that still gets you to 200 million square miles, 5-6 times the size of the United States. To get all those cats into, say, Wyoming, you’d have a density of 27,602 cats/square mile – which is shockingly close to the human density, 27,779 people/square mile, of New York City.

Wyoming, in other words, would look like this:

And it turns out Wyoming land isn’t cheap – if you apply the $450/acre for ranch land quoted in this article, over $28 billion.

Of course, total land value in the United States is probably over $15 trillion at this point so we could just have a land standard. That would be a lot easier. A whole lot easier…

Than herding cats.