Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency

Description

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 civilization 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 travelers 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 marvelous characters, stories, and ideas, Digital Cash is an engaging and accessible account of the strange origins and remarkable technologies behind today's cryptocurrency explosion.

Finn Brunton is associate 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.

"Winner of the Bronze Medal in Business Technology, Axiom Business Book Awards" "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 "[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 "[Brunton] brings to life the history of efforts to synthesize money out of math and electrons . . . Digital Cash is stocked with colorful characters . . . Readers may at times feel as though they were dropped without explanation into the middle of a dinner party, albeit a delightful one."---Kevin Werbach, Los Angeles Review of Books "Brunton makes a convincing argument that for all their hype, cryptocurrencies cannot - and should not - be the future of money."---Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, Financial Times "The best book I've read this year."---Joe Weisenthal, Bloomberg Markets "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 dives into the history and philosophy of cryptocurrency, unearthing some unforgettable characters along the way." * Happy Magazine * "Digital Cash is a good book. Even experienced denizens of the cryptocurrency space are likely to learn something from it. Brunton comes across as a thoughtful outsider, one who take bitcoin and the ideas embraced by its users quite seriously."---Sonya Mann, Reason "Brunton's book is an important record of concepts and the players that have contributed to what may represent a whole new phase of civilisation. "---S. Ananthanarayanan, The Statesman