This better be good, is all we can say. The Federal Reserve’s chairman, Jerome Powell, is promising to deliver over the summer a discussion paper on cryptocurrencies. He announced that Thursday in a rare video press release. The New York Post takes it as a signal that a “crackdown” could be coming. Mr. Powell himself said the Fed might even issue a cryptocurrency — or a Central Bank Digital Currency — of its own.

Before the Federal Reserve goes into business hawking its own cryptocurrencies, though, it might want to get on top of the Federal Reserve notes it’s already circulating. It has had primary responsibility for the dollar since 1971, when President Nixon closed the gold window and Congress plunged the country into the age of fiat money. Since then, the Fed’s irredeemable electronic paper ticket money has lost 98% of its value.

By “value” we speak of what a dollar it will fetch in classical, constitutional money — gold. Until the “Nixon Shock,” America was bound to redeem dollars presented by foreign countries at a 35th of an ounce of gold. Today a dollar won’t fetch an 1,880th of an ounce. It’s shed 86% of its value just since Bill Clinton was president. At one point under Chairman Powell, a greenback couldn’t fetch a 2,000th of an ounce.

Using the classic measure, the value of the dollars put into circulation by the Federal Reserve in recent decades have been all over the map. It’s like riding the Cyclone at Coney Island. We understand that gold convertibility isn’t the only method used these days to reckon the value of a dollar. Yet even the so-called Dollar Index, which reckons the value of the dollar against a basket of currencies, looks like a roller coaster.

If the Federal Reserve can’t stabilize the currency it’s been using for decades, what makes it think it’s a logical move for it to go into the business of crypto? Mr. Powell ignores this question. He begins his video press release by noting that today we are in the midst of a technological revolution that is fundamentally changing our world: reshaping how we communicate, access information, and purchase goods and services.”

The technological features of the revolution in the midst of which we find ourselves strike us as the least of the issues. The real revolution, if that’s the word for it, is fiat money — the idea that the currency has no connection to gold or silver or other specie. And the idea that when it is presented for redemption the only obligation of the government is to redeem it with base metal coins or more paper money.

This is a revolution in which the Federal Reserve can print — or create out of pixels — all the money it wants and lend it to the government that owns the Fed. It’s a revolution in which the concern over asset inflation is brushed aside — and in which price stability becomes a policy of seeking inflation of 2% (on, it later develops, average). Such debasement would wipe out savings within two generations.

No sooner had Chairman Powell promised the discussion paper over the summer than Governor Brainard hit the hustings to plump for the idea. First, though, she issued a warning about so-called stablecoins, which she defined as a “digital asset whose value is tied in some way to traditional stores of value, such as government-issued, or fiat, currencies or” — mark the moment, we say — “gold.” She actually uttered the word.

One of Ms. Brainard’s concerns about stablecoins seems to be, as she put it, “the extent to which a central issuer is liable for making good on redemption rights.” We carry no brief for stablecoins; there are controversies.* We’re just marking the irony of a governor of the issuer of our irredeemable electronic paper ticket currency coming down with the fantods about the redeemability of private digital stablecoins. Where was she in 1933?

“Unlike central bank fiat currencies,” she says, “stablecoins do not have legal tender status.” She seems to suggest that government fiat currencies with no legal definition in our laws would be superior to private stablecoins linked to gold. “Depending on underlying arrangements, some may expose consumers and businesses to risk,” she says, without mentioning — to bring it back full circle — that since the Fed began operations in 1914 the dollar has shed 99% its value.

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* In February the issuer of the stablecoin known as Tether settled a dispute with New York State, which accused it of covering up losses.