Princeton University Press
Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency
Key Metrics
- Finn Brunton
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691179490
- 8.6 X 5.6 X 1.1 inches
- 1.1 pounds
- Business & Economics > Money & Monetary Policy
- English
Secure TransactionBook 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.
Author Bio
Finn Brunton is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press, 2013), Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest with Helen Nissenbaum (MIT Press, 2015), Communication with Mercedes Bunz and Paula Bialski (University of Minnesota Press/Meson, 2019), and Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency (Princeton University Press, 2019) along with numerous articles and papers.
Research Interests
Histories and theories of technology; history of computing (pre- and post-electronic), networking, early programming, cryptography; hacking and hacker culture, free and open source software; failed technologies, vaporware, theories of hype, dead media, abandoned infrastructure; transhumanism, cosmism, cryonics, Extropians; surveillance and privacy; currencies, cryptocurrencies, transaction and payment systems, debt, alternative and experimental currencies; history of capitalism, socialist calculation problem, Cybersyn, autonomy, workerism/operaismo; ancient technologies: knots and knotting, cordage and textiles, mnemonics, metallurgy, foraging, load carriage; abolitionist projects; historiography, theories of history, Ginzburg, Braudel, Koselleck; manufacturing and logistics. Currently working on a project about the history and practices of rational utopians and their media over the last two hundred years or so.
Source: University of California, Davis and NYU Steinhardt
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