Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency Kindle Edition
The fascinating untold story of digital cash and its creators—from experiments in the 1970s to the mania over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin may appear to be a revolutionary form of digital cash without precedent or prehistory. In fact, it is only the best-known recent experiment in a long line of similar efforts going back to the 1970s. But the story behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and its blockchain technology has largely been untold—until now. In Digital Cash, Finn Brunton reveals how technological utopians and political radicals created experimental money to bring about their visions of the future: protecting privacy or bringing down governments, preparing for apocalypse or launching a civilisation of innovation and abundance that would make its creators immortal.
The incredible story of the pioneers of cryptocurrency takes us from autonomous zones on the high seas to the world’s most valuable dump, from bank runs to idea coupons, from time travellers in a San Francisco bar to the pattern securing every twenty-dollar bill, and from marketplaces for dangerous secrets to a tank of frozen heads awaiting revival in the far future. Along the way, Digital Cash explores the hard questions and challenges that these innovators faced: How do we learn to trust and use different kinds of money? What makes digital objects valuable? How does currency prove itself as real to us? What would it take to make a digital equivalent to cash, something that could be created but not forged, exchanged but not copied, and which reveals nothing about its users?
Filled with marvellous characters, stories, and ideas, Digital Cash is an engaging and accessible account of the strange origins and remarkable technologies behind today’s cryptocurrency explosion.
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“Brunton’s wildly inventive history reveals the dystopian visions that drove the creation of digital cash. Both a lucid unfolding of the technologies inside of money and a thrilling page-turner that takes us from secret WWII-era codebooks to cryopreservation sci-fi, Digital Cash is the rarest of books: engaging, philosophical, and urgent.”–Tung-Hui Hu, author of A Prehistory of the Cloud
“A very important book.”–Lana Swartz, coeditor of Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff
“Ever wondered why anyone would build cryptocurrency? Finn Brunton dances across the fantasies that inspired its development. From the demise of governments, to spontaneous market order, to immortality, he shows us that cryptocurrency runs on techno-utopias both familiar and strange and reveals how these far-out visions are shaping our daily realities.”–Caitlin Zaloom, New York University
“On rare occasions a book comes along whose contents are too extraordinary to be believed. It may be the characters, the narrative or perhaps its evocative prose. . . . Digital Cash will raise as many questions as it answers. You may feel elated, amused and even depressed in turn. But like any good book it will lead you to further reading, to new ideas and eventually, perhaps, to enlightenment.”—Gregory Dobbs, Good Reading
“Digital Cash is the history of the internet in inverted color. It’s a story full of passionate, misguided, utopian, and paranoid characters at the center of a fevered money-dream. From company scrip to Bitcoin, from anticounterfeit technology to missed cryptographic connections, Brunton’s book is bedazzling cultural history.”–Christopher M. Kelty, University of California, Los Angeles
“Beautifully written and meticulously researched, Digital Cash manages to connect these multiple pasts to key contemporary questions of digital value, ownership, and politics.”—Rachel O’Dwyer, Science
“A fascinating and important book that addresses big questions about cryptocurrency: What is money? How can virtual things have lasting value? And what does the explosion of cryptocurrency mean for the global economy? I can’t think of another book on the subject that accomplishes so much in such a concise and readable way.”–Nathan Ensmenger, author of The Computer Boys Take Over
“The best book I’ve read this year.”—Joe Weisenthal, Bloomberg Markets
“Brunton makes a convincing argument that for all their hype, cryptocurrencies cannot — and should not — be the future of money.”—Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, Financial Times
“[Digital Cash] is quite a ride, from cryptographer David Chaum’s failed DigiCash initiative of 1989 through to the bitcoin saga — by way of ‘a wall of lava lamps, and a tank of frozen human heads’.”—Barbara Kiser, Nature
About the Author
Finn Brunton, is assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet and the coauthor of Communication and Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest. He has written for the Guardian, Artforum, and Radical Philosophy, among many other publications.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Essential guide to the fascinating history and meaning of digital cash
2 July 2019 – Published on books-for-everyone.com
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This is a superb and beautifully written book about digital cash — not electronic funds, but cryptocurrency, an electronic currency medium that can prove, certify, and authenticate itself, without exposing the identities of the transacting parties. Author Finn Brunton expertly narrates the struggle to create cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and does so in understandable language suitable for a general readership. But the book does much more. Noting that all currencies carry with them a vision of the future — what will my money be worth tomorrow? Five years from now? — Brunton suggests that a given digital cash system such as Bitcoin amounts to a “cosmogram,” an artifact that embodies an envisioned system of social relationships and an anticipated future, as well as the means to bring about that future: a world currency, free from all government control, that would retain its value even as other currencies crashed. To tell the story fully, Brunton traces digital cash’s origins to technocrats, cypherpunks, crypto-anarchists, Extropians, libertarians, agorists, and neoliberal economists, most of whom expressed extreme pessimism about the near future… even to the point of freezing their bodies after death, as some Extropians have done, to be awakened only after the Collapse and the formation of the utopia to come. But they’ll remain asleep for quite a while longer, based on Brunton’s assessment of Bitcoin today: “a wildly volatile vehicle for baseless speculation, a roller coaster of ups and downs driven by a mix of hype, price-fixing, bursts of frenzied panic, and the dream of getting rich without doing much of anything” (p. 204). Still, Bitcoin’s underlying technologies will undoubtedly affect tomorrow’s currency systems: in describing the blockchain concept, Brunton likens it to a dollar bill that, upon inspection, reveals the note’s entire transactional history, including the secret identities of all who exchanged it. As Brunton observes, books will be written about future cryptocurrencies, surely, but Digital Cash does an excellent job of explain where we are today, and why.
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