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

By @SimonCocking review of Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency by Finn Brunton . Available from Amazon here.

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.

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

Ten years on from Satoshi Nakamoto’s first notes for his ideas on a decentralised currency, bitcoin, based on a distributed ledger system, blockchain. This book is an interesting and wide ranging exploration of the ecosystem from which Nakamoto’s ideas emerged. From Nakamoto’s earliest correspondences with other leading innovators and thinkers in this area it was clear that he/she/it/they were trying to build on what went before, with a clear desire to recognise the insights, input and work of others.

Brunton’s book aims to dig into the sources of inspiration for the whole, overall desire to achieve nonfiat, nongovernment controlled, sources of digital currency. This exploration takes in a wide range of intellectuals, cypherpunks, anarchists, cryonics and beyond. At times we had to double check to work out how the train of thought had led the narrative to various points. This was also a positive exploration too as it highlights just how wide the range of interest is, and also, equally how wide the range of potential uses and applications for digital cash can and will be, both for good and potentially otherwise.

A side note on the cover, it is a great cover, and very much an effective reminder of all the symbolism and embedded mythology in the world’s current, printed sources of currency. It also helps to make the point that our current systems of currency are, to a large degree only our latest imperfect faith based attempts to build a way to trade and interact with the rest of the world. Any new system will make existing structures potentially outdated and obsolete.

We enjoyed Brunton’s desire to pull in as many different and disparate elements to this exploration of the origins of digital cash, as we sit on the threshold of many new, paradigm-changing ways of doing business and interacting with the world. We are also in the fortunate position too that many of the key actors are still alive, able to communicate their reasons for what they did, and to continue to articulate where the future might take us too. An interesting potpourri of a book.

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