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Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency
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.
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.
272 pages, Hardcover
Published June 25, 2019
About the author
Finn Brunton
8 books13 followersFinn 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.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
June 21, 2021
For a few years I have been interested in Cryptocurrencies, maybe for the wrong reasons. Initially I was drawn in by Bitcoin because of it’s forced scarcity and anti-inflationary aspects as a vehicle for investment. To be honest I thought it was at least worth the gamble of throwing a few bucks at under the knowledge that is could 100x or go to zero. That was back in 2018. Since then my portfolio has seen some coins crash to zero, some exchanges hacked and my coins lost, and a minority of portfolio increasing 10x. All in all I am basically back where I started. In 2020 I once again came back into the space with a renewed interest. In part because of the pandemic and the promise of inflation of the US dollar due to stimulus packages. This time around I was a bit more serious and figured before I “gambled” more money I should at least develop a base understanding of the actual technology. That’s what led me to picking up “Digital Cash”
To be honest I was excepting to get a fairly dry book that describe protocols, programming, and maybe some high level economic theory. I couldn't have been more wrong… and thankfully so.
Digital Cash sets it’s intentions early on. This is not a book about Bitcoin or Cryptocurrencies per say but rather maintains a larger scope by looking at traditional money and it’s failings before introducing Austrian economics, Libertarian ideals, and the origin of cryptography as a whole.
This book does a great job of weaving in histories of each subject with an almost biographical feel to draw you through the connecting histories of these subjects. We jump from WW2 era code breaking and communication to commentary on Hayek and onward to the 1980’s where we see Cypherpunks and their anarchist-utopian viewpoints. And not to mention the rundown as to how frozen heads, transhumanists, and silicon valley bros trying to beat death, play a part. At times it feels like you are on an esoteric journey through visions of the future. However, through this weird and fascinating history the book maintains readability throughout it’s course and is perfect for the average reader; with no special knowledge needed prior to jumping in.
While this book only touches on modern cryptocurrencies for about 20% of it’s total length (almost all of which is on Bitcoin with a singular mention of Ethereum) I found myself coming away with a more thorough understanding on exactly what makes Bitcoin tick, and thus what contributes to it’s value.
In the future I may pick up additional books focused on Bitcoin and other currencies but as far as a jumping off point into the world of crypto I don’t think I could have picked a better starting point. I would recommend this book not only as an enjoyable read to satisfy the curiosity of a non-investor, but also to any current investors looking to cement your understanding of the purpose of crypto and it’s ideals. I also look forward to reading more from Finn Burton on other topics as well as I found his pace and prose engaging throughout.
To be honest I was excepting to get a fairly dry book that describe protocols, programming, and maybe some high level economic theory. I couldn't have been more wrong… and thankfully so.
Digital Cash sets it’s intentions early on. This is not a book about Bitcoin or Cryptocurrencies per say but rather maintains a larger scope by looking at traditional money and it’s failings before introducing Austrian economics, Libertarian ideals, and the origin of cryptography as a whole.
This book does a great job of weaving in histories of each subject with an almost biographical feel to draw you through the connecting histories of these subjects. We jump from WW2 era code breaking and communication to commentary on Hayek and onward to the 1980’s where we see Cypherpunks and their anarchist-utopian viewpoints. And not to mention the rundown as to how frozen heads, transhumanists, and silicon valley bros trying to beat death, play a part. At times it feels like you are on an esoteric journey through visions of the future. However, through this weird and fascinating history the book maintains readability throughout it’s course and is perfect for the average reader; with no special knowledge needed prior to jumping in.
While this book only touches on modern cryptocurrencies for about 20% of it’s total length (almost all of which is on Bitcoin with a singular mention of Ethereum) I found myself coming away with a more thorough understanding on exactly what makes Bitcoin tick, and thus what contributes to it’s value.
In the future I may pick up additional books focused on Bitcoin and other currencies but as far as a jumping off point into the world of crypto I don’t think I could have picked a better starting point. I would recommend this book not only as an enjoyable read to satisfy the curiosity of a non-investor, but also to any current investors looking to cement your understanding of the purpose of crypto and it’s ideals. I also look forward to reading more from Finn Burton on other topics as well as I found his pace and prose engaging throughout.
October 28, 2019
Digital Cash’s promise is to tell the history of the technologies, ideas, and ideologies that lead to cryptocurrency, to Bitcoin. When I was about a third of the way through, Brunton was doing such a fine job that I tentatively recommended the book within a review for another book. Before finishing it I edited that review to remove the recommendation.
Setting out somewhat arbitrarily in the 1920s, nearly a century removed from Bitcoin’s first block, practically anything of the era might have been Brunton’s point of departure for conveying readers to present day; nevertheless, he charts a fairly engaging history with many persons, movements, and accounts that were if not brand new to me then near it. As the narrative progresses, though, it becomes increasingly clear that the historical/anthropological profile he’s painting is intended to function as condemnation of Bitcoin’s economic profile, rendering the economic discussion somehow unnecessary.
While initially the eccentrics that flesh out Digital Cash can be profiled from a loving temporal distance, as we near the present they become united for Brunton in their fantasies of surviving governmental and societal collapse via their reliance on hard money. If such fantasies have persisted for decades and have accompanied many ultimately failed attempts at creating an independently controlled money (digital or otherwise), it wouldn’t be strange at this point to ask why Bitcoin’s success has so far exceeded that of its progenitors. While Brunton does tell the story of many engineering breakthroughs which ultimately enable decentralized and digitized hard money, he seems overall incurious about why Bitcoin made it so much further than others. For him the more important thing is that all these crazy fantasies now have a more-than-theoretical center of gravitation. That it is is here more primary than the whys. If the whys were more than incidental, a good starting place for answers would be view money as a technology. Certainly Brunton would concede that Bitcoin is a technology, but there were no signs that he sees money itself as technological.
For Brunton money is “passing current”:
Second, passing current is also apparently a term in physics and electrical engineering, frivolously tacked on to endow passing current with a technological gloss because, hey, Bitcoin uses computers. “Finally, and metaphorically, the ‘passing current’ evokes the elapsing of present time—the passing of this current moment between the documented and narrated past and the predicted, desired, and feared future.”
Because for Brunton money is ultimately a social agreement (in the sense that you expect people to accept tomorrow the cash you hold today and vice versa), its frame of analysis never exceeds the sociological. The (technical/technological) properties that make a given or latent money attractive for anyone to hold in anticipation of being able to pass it on aren’t defined or questioned. He never mentions, to affirm nor refute, money’s traditionally defined properties of store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account. If there’s an economic parallel to his depiction of money it’s probably found in the Keynesian focus on velocity of money—the characterization of money as something that passes doesn’t lend the impression of something stationary. Meanwhile, Brunton’s pejorative characterization of saving money as “hoarding” demonstrates that he doesn’t hold much esteem for money as a store of value. But this is about the most one can say of his ideas of money.
While Brunton’s own conception of money goes little beyond riffing and wordplay, he’s fairly certain about what money is for his (mostly) Libertarian subjects: objective or intrinsic value. Although he always uses the terms in quotes he never provides an origin, leaving unclear whether these are source quotes or scare quotes. (After a while “intrinsic value” comes across less as a Libertarian fetish than Brunton’s fetish about Libertarians.) He first attributes the idea to Ludwig von Mises (“The first [solution to the problem of money’s uncertain grounding] was that money must possess ‘intrinsic value,’ an approach championed by Mises.”), but if it’s a quotation from a Mises work Brunton doesn’t provide context or say from where it was taken. From here on out the term is used freely (along with its synonym “objective value”) without even pretense of attribution. As far as I can tell Brunton has confused the idea that the intrinsic properties of a given commodity (the chemical properties of gold, for example) will make it more or less suitable for use as money with the idea that the money itself has intrinsic value (which doesn’t make a lot of sense).
It’s not that he’s being dishonest here—it seems to be a legitimate confusion on his part. But it makes a big difference. The intrinsic properties hard money enthusiasts are interested in are resistance to corrosion or to counterfeiting among other things—“unforgeable costliness” as Nick Szabo (profiled in the book) has termed it. Sometimes they’re interested in industrial or aesthetic uses that a given commodity has which would form some minimum demand that it’s monetary value can ride on top of. But this is still based on intrinsic properties, not intrinsic value. A dollar when you already have a hundred is probably less valuable to you than a dollar is if you currently have zero. Your estimation of a gram of gold, likewise, is not the same if you already have a hundred grams than if you have none. It’s certainly possible that there are Libertarians who extol hard money for its “intrinsic” value—my own reading here isn’t extremely broad, so I can’t conclusively say—but the mises.org wiki has no such listing. There is however a listing for the complete opposite idea, the subjective theory of value, which was endorsed by Mises and Austrian Carl Menger before him.
Under a subjective theory of value there should be choice in money, and this is why it’s important to ask why Bitcoin has succeeded to the degree it has. When people have a choice in money, when monies compete, what comes out the winner? Prior to Bitcoin there hasn’t been a choice in money because governments tend not to want to cede that authority, but Bitcoin’s technological breakthrough lies in overriding that proscription to establish not a dictate but a choice. Brunton dismisses the Austrian School’s economics then says without blinking that state-issued monies “tend toward mild inflation to boost economic growth (with occasional extreme and disastrous exceptions, like Venezuela)”. Given the option of a money that maintains or increases in purchasing power versus one which tends toward mild inflation to boost economic growth (except for when things go haywire) I wonder what the average middle class saver (i.e., hoarder) would opt for.
There’s unsurprisingly a one-dimensional criticism (perfunctory at this point in the book) of the Bitcoin network’s energy usage. Amounting to little more than a paragraph, predictably there’s no investigation into what kind of energy is used, whether proximity-wise it could feasibly be used for something else, what’s achieved in return, or what the alternative is. That is, there’s no sense of proportion or tradeoffs. He mentions briefly the Bitcoin network’s “voracious appetite for electricity, which had to come from somewhere—burning coal or natural gas, spinning turbines, decaying uranium—and which wasn’t being used for something arguably more constructive than this discovery of meaningless hashes [of the Bitcoin protocol’s proof of work mining algorithm].” While he’s correct that the hashes themselves are meaningless he myopically attributes this lack of meaning to the task they’re being harnessed for, comparing Bitcoin mining to Keynes’s flippant response to doubters of his program: “just put banknotes in bottles, he suggested, and bury them in disused coal mines for people to dig up—a useless task to slow the dispersal of the new money and get people to work for it.” But bitcoin issuance is only an incidental aspect of mining—mining just happens to be an expedient means of distribution. Mining’s primary purpose is to secure the network. Now perhaps Brunton would want to call the usefulness of this into question, but he settles for condemning the (purposefully) meaningless hashes.
Later:
Brunton’s succinct encapsulation of Bitcoin is offered up here only to lament the more interesting applications of “the blockchain” which have apparently been overlooked. This list of Bitcoin’s attributes were investigated within a narrative of their development by various techno-subcultures; while their merits are never otherwise independently assessed, here at the end of the book he’s somehow able to dismiss them. Meanwhile, these “more interesting applications” come out of nowhere and are offered up without defense.
Art ownership is a more interesting and “potentially more valuable application” than abstract scarcity? Possibly. But is it also possible that the current art market is as bloated as it is because art has become simply another speculative financial asset in a world where national currencies function increasingly poorly as reliable stores of value? The blockchain should be used for property sharing and access schemes? Brunton profiles James Howells who mined bitcoins in 2009 and subsequently threw away the hard drive which stored his private keys to access them. When later they were worth millions Howells went searching for the drive at the local garbage dump. When private keys are lost the coins still exist but the owner no longer has access to them. The individual loses a fortune, and the abstract “coins”, because they are themselves abstractions, are effectively withdrawn from use as would be a burned paper currency note. But what if ownership of the garbage dump Howells’s hard drive was deposited in was itself tokenized on the blockchain in a sharing and access scheme and those private keys were lost? The property is still there because it’s not at all abstract, but the token which represents ownership/access can no longer be moved and no one can prove ownership. Who would Howells speak with to request permission to search the dump? What if the dump wasn’t located in Wales but in some less hospitable country—what happens when a local despot says, “what blockchain?” after finding out that the dump contains somewhere within it a hard drive granting access to millions in bitcoin? In this case the blockchain concerned with maintaining the property rights to the land will be swiftly overridden in search of the hard drive containing bitcoins, whose blockchain won’t be so easily superseded.
Despite apparently having followed Bitcoin since the beginning, Brunton doesn’t progress beyond the internal mythology of its first two or three years of existence. He seems content to have Bitcoin function as the exclamation point to his Libertarian-collapse-fantasy narrative while leaving Bitcoin’s post-2011 development almost entirely unexplored, allowing everything proceeding this arbitrary stopping point to be damned by all matter of transpirings from decades prior. It’s a shame for a book being published in 2019 that the more current history is left untold.
Furthermore, while Brunton cites plenty of primary source material, for secondary analysis he looks to other academics (of the sociological bent), showing zero signs (again despite having followed Bitcoin from the beginning) of having interacted with his home university’s computer science department, let alone anyone who’s actively building the things he’s commenting on. (And so he gets technical details wrong as other reviews have pointed out.) While accusing bitcoiners (and their historical forebears) of living out collapse fantasies, in declining to interact with them, Brunton lives out his own escape fantasy in which sociologists and media theorists gain outsized influence via their own circular economy of peer citation.
To temper these criticisms somewhat, I’ll reiterate that much of the book is interesting and worth a read, but much of what’s of interest is brought up to dismantle something that’s not actually engaged with. So if you decide to read Digital Cash and it’s your first broad exposure to this technology, for a fuller picture I recommend accompanying it with a read of The Little Bitcoin Book , my review for which now has a recommendation for Digital Cash removed.
Setting out somewhat arbitrarily in the 1920s, nearly a century removed from Bitcoin’s first block, practically anything of the era might have been Brunton’s point of departure for conveying readers to present day; nevertheless, he charts a fairly engaging history with many persons, movements, and accounts that were if not brand new to me then near it. As the narrative progresses, though, it becomes increasingly clear that the historical/anthropological profile he’s painting is intended to function as condemnation of Bitcoin’s economic profile, rendering the economic discussion somehow unnecessary.
While initially the eccentrics that flesh out Digital Cash can be profiled from a loving temporal distance, as we near the present they become united for Brunton in their fantasies of surviving governmental and societal collapse via their reliance on hard money. If such fantasies have persisted for decades and have accompanied many ultimately failed attempts at creating an independently controlled money (digital or otherwise), it wouldn’t be strange at this point to ask why Bitcoin’s success has so far exceeded that of its progenitors. While Brunton does tell the story of many engineering breakthroughs which ultimately enable decentralized and digitized hard money, he seems overall incurious about why Bitcoin made it so much further than others. For him the more important thing is that all these crazy fantasies now have a more-than-theoretical center of gravitation. That it is is here more primary than the whys. If the whys were more than incidental, a good starting place for answers would be view money as a technology. Certainly Brunton would concede that Bitcoin is a technology, but there were no signs that he sees money itself as technological.
For Brunton money is “passing current”:
Passing current is a term in the world of currency for money that is generally accepted for exchange, passing from person to person. The idea of the cash in your wallet being “current money,” though, holds true only because it is anticipatory money: the next person offered will take it, and it can ultimately be accepted in taxes or otherwise redeemed. Its present-time “currency,” the fact that it passes, is a product of its futurity.
Second, passing current is also apparently a term in physics and electrical engineering, frivolously tacked on to endow passing current with a technological gloss because, hey, Bitcoin uses computers. “Finally, and metaphorically, the ‘passing current’ evokes the elapsing of present time—the passing of this current moment between the documented and narrated past and the predicted, desired, and feared future.”
Because for Brunton money is ultimately a social agreement (in the sense that you expect people to accept tomorrow the cash you hold today and vice versa), its frame of analysis never exceeds the sociological. The (technical/technological) properties that make a given or latent money attractive for anyone to hold in anticipation of being able to pass it on aren’t defined or questioned. He never mentions, to affirm nor refute, money’s traditionally defined properties of store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account. If there’s an economic parallel to his depiction of money it’s probably found in the Keynesian focus on velocity of money—the characterization of money as something that passes doesn’t lend the impression of something stationary. Meanwhile, Brunton’s pejorative characterization of saving money as “hoarding” demonstrates that he doesn’t hold much esteem for money as a store of value. But this is about the most one can say of his ideas of money.
While Brunton’s own conception of money goes little beyond riffing and wordplay, he’s fairly certain about what money is for his (mostly) Libertarian subjects: objective or intrinsic value. Although he always uses the terms in quotes he never provides an origin, leaving unclear whether these are source quotes or scare quotes. (After a while “intrinsic value” comes across less as a Libertarian fetish than Brunton’s fetish about Libertarians.) He first attributes the idea to Ludwig von Mises (“The first [solution to the problem of money’s uncertain grounding] was that money must possess ‘intrinsic value,’ an approach championed by Mises.”), but if it’s a quotation from a Mises work Brunton doesn’t provide context or say from where it was taken. From here on out the term is used freely (along with its synonym “objective value”) without even pretense of attribution. As far as I can tell Brunton has confused the idea that the intrinsic properties of a given commodity (the chemical properties of gold, for example) will make it more or less suitable for use as money with the idea that the money itself has intrinsic value (which doesn’t make a lot of sense).
It’s not that he’s being dishonest here—it seems to be a legitimate confusion on his part. But it makes a big difference. The intrinsic properties hard money enthusiasts are interested in are resistance to corrosion or to counterfeiting among other things—“unforgeable costliness” as Nick Szabo (profiled in the book) has termed it. Sometimes they’re interested in industrial or aesthetic uses that a given commodity has which would form some minimum demand that it’s monetary value can ride on top of. But this is still based on intrinsic properties, not intrinsic value. A dollar when you already have a hundred is probably less valuable to you than a dollar is if you currently have zero. Your estimation of a gram of gold, likewise, is not the same if you already have a hundred grams than if you have none. It’s certainly possible that there are Libertarians who extol hard money for its “intrinsic” value—my own reading here isn’t extremely broad, so I can’t conclusively say—but the mises.org wiki has no such listing. There is however a listing for the complete opposite idea, the subjective theory of value, which was endorsed by Mises and Austrian Carl Menger before him.
Under a subjective theory of value there should be choice in money, and this is why it’s important to ask why Bitcoin has succeeded to the degree it has. When people have a choice in money, when monies compete, what comes out the winner? Prior to Bitcoin there hasn’t been a choice in money because governments tend not to want to cede that authority, but Bitcoin’s technological breakthrough lies in overriding that proscription to establish not a dictate but a choice. Brunton dismisses the Austrian School’s economics then says without blinking that state-issued monies “tend toward mild inflation to boost economic growth (with occasional extreme and disastrous exceptions, like Venezuela)”. Given the option of a money that maintains or increases in purchasing power versus one which tends toward mild inflation to boost economic growth (except for when things go haywire) I wonder what the average middle class saver (i.e., hoarder) would opt for.
There’s unsurprisingly a one-dimensional criticism (perfunctory at this point in the book) of the Bitcoin network’s energy usage. Amounting to little more than a paragraph, predictably there’s no investigation into what kind of energy is used, whether proximity-wise it could feasibly be used for something else, what’s achieved in return, or what the alternative is. That is, there’s no sense of proportion or tradeoffs. He mentions briefly the Bitcoin network’s “voracious appetite for electricity, which had to come from somewhere—burning coal or natural gas, spinning turbines, decaying uranium—and which wasn’t being used for something arguably more constructive than this discovery of meaningless hashes [of the Bitcoin protocol’s proof of work mining algorithm].” While he’s correct that the hashes themselves are meaningless he myopically attributes this lack of meaning to the task they’re being harnessed for, comparing Bitcoin mining to Keynes’s flippant response to doubters of his program: “just put banknotes in bottles, he suggested, and bury them in disused coal mines for people to dig up—a useless task to slow the dispersal of the new money and get people to work for it.” But bitcoin issuance is only an incidental aspect of mining—mining just happens to be an expedient means of distribution. Mining’s primary purpose is to secure the network. Now perhaps Brunton would want to call the usefulness of this into question, but he settles for condemning the (purposefully) meaningless hashes.
Later:
[Predictable scarcity] is what Bitcoin generates. Abstractly, that is all it generates, aside from enormous quantities of heat: verifiable, distributed, trustless scarcity. It provides the certitude that no one else has the right to trade any particular bitcoin, that no copies are being produced, and that the overall number is fixed and will remain so, becoming steadily harder to create. It puts this scarce object into an infrastructure of ownership: the distributed irrefutable ledger of the blockchain—the blockchain that turned out to have so many more interesting and potentially valuable applications, from establishing the ownership of digital artworks to enabling property sharing and access schemes.”
Brunton’s succinct encapsulation of Bitcoin is offered up here only to lament the more interesting applications of “the blockchain” which have apparently been overlooked. This list of Bitcoin’s attributes were investigated within a narrative of their development by various techno-subcultures; while their merits are never otherwise independently assessed, here at the end of the book he’s somehow able to dismiss them. Meanwhile, these “more interesting applications” come out of nowhere and are offered up without defense.
Art ownership is a more interesting and “potentially more valuable application” than abstract scarcity? Possibly. But is it also possible that the current art market is as bloated as it is because art has become simply another speculative financial asset in a world where national currencies function increasingly poorly as reliable stores of value? The blockchain should be used for property sharing and access schemes? Brunton profiles James Howells who mined bitcoins in 2009 and subsequently threw away the hard drive which stored his private keys to access them. When later they were worth millions Howells went searching for the drive at the local garbage dump. When private keys are lost the coins still exist but the owner no longer has access to them. The individual loses a fortune, and the abstract “coins”, because they are themselves abstractions, are effectively withdrawn from use as would be a burned paper currency note. But what if ownership of the garbage dump Howells’s hard drive was deposited in was itself tokenized on the blockchain in a sharing and access scheme and those private keys were lost? The property is still there because it’s not at all abstract, but the token which represents ownership/access can no longer be moved and no one can prove ownership. Who would Howells speak with to request permission to search the dump? What if the dump wasn’t located in Wales but in some less hospitable country—what happens when a local despot says, “what blockchain?” after finding out that the dump contains somewhere within it a hard drive granting access to millions in bitcoin? In this case the blockchain concerned with maintaining the property rights to the land will be swiftly overridden in search of the hard drive containing bitcoins, whose blockchain won’t be so easily superseded.
Despite apparently having followed Bitcoin since the beginning, Brunton doesn’t progress beyond the internal mythology of its first two or three years of existence. He seems content to have Bitcoin function as the exclamation point to his Libertarian-collapse-fantasy narrative while leaving Bitcoin’s post-2011 development almost entirely unexplored, allowing everything proceeding this arbitrary stopping point to be damned by all matter of transpirings from decades prior. It’s a shame for a book being published in 2019 that the more current history is left untold.
Furthermore, while Brunton cites plenty of primary source material, for secondary analysis he looks to other academics (of the sociological bent), showing zero signs (again despite having followed Bitcoin from the beginning) of having interacted with his home university’s computer science department, let alone anyone who’s actively building the things he’s commenting on. (And so he gets technical details wrong as other reviews have pointed out.) While accusing bitcoiners (and their historical forebears) of living out collapse fantasies, in declining to interact with them, Brunton lives out his own escape fantasy in which sociologists and media theorists gain outsized influence via their own circular economy of peer citation.
To temper these criticisms somewhat, I’ll reiterate that much of the book is interesting and worth a read, but much of what’s of interest is brought up to dismantle something that’s not actually engaged with. So if you decide to read Digital Cash and it’s your first broad exposure to this technology, for a fuller picture I recommend accompanying it with a read of The Little Bitcoin Book , my review for which now has a recommendation for Digital Cash removed.
February 16, 2020
As this book unfolds, Brunton's tone becomes increasingly filled with smug disdain for his subject until ultimately he is revealed to have been writing in bad faith. As with most effective strawman attacks, his narrative is built on kernels of truth that are amplified and distorted to serve the pre-determined conclusion. He avoids applying his own critical apparatus to the institutions and "cosmograms" of the status quo that his subject is fighting against.
He is fond of using the polemical trick of smearing a character with an irrelevant, unsubstantiated or misleading aside before describing their ideas in order to predispose the reader against them. He abuses all free-market or Austrian thinkers in this way including Hayek (supported Pinochet), Rothbard ("one-note ideologue, racist"), Mises (whose work is "eccentric, convoluted" and "a fantasy"), Milton Friedman ("responsible for some of the most extreme free market policies ever enacted" and also Pinochet apologist) to point out a few. (He associates "free market" with "fantasy" many times as well.) It would be like responding to Bernie Sanders' critique of crony capitalism by saying "Sanders loved communist Russia, Castro, Chavez and many other terrible totalitarian regimes and therefore his critique is wrong." Sanders liked all of those people, but that doesn't mean crony capitalism doesn't suck.
There is some value in Brunton's collection and presentation of earlier attempts at creating alternative currencies and the precursor communities like the Extropians and cypherpunks, because there simply aren't that many such books. However, one must take his interpretations with skepticism and use the book mainly as a guide to discover primary sources. Read the arguments these people made directly and come to your own conclusions about their validity.
He is fond of using the polemical trick of smearing a character with an irrelevant, unsubstantiated or misleading aside before describing their ideas in order to predispose the reader against them. He abuses all free-market or Austrian thinkers in this way including Hayek (supported Pinochet), Rothbard ("one-note ideologue, racist"), Mises (whose work is "eccentric, convoluted" and "a fantasy"), Milton Friedman ("responsible for some of the most extreme free market policies ever enacted" and also Pinochet apologist) to point out a few. (He associates "free market" with "fantasy" many times as well.) It would be like responding to Bernie Sanders' critique of crony capitalism by saying "Sanders loved communist Russia, Castro, Chavez and many other terrible totalitarian regimes and therefore his critique is wrong." Sanders liked all of those people, but that doesn't mean crony capitalism doesn't suck.
There is some value in Brunton's collection and presentation of earlier attempts at creating alternative currencies and the precursor communities like the Extropians and cypherpunks, because there simply aren't that many such books. However, one must take his interpretations with skepticism and use the book mainly as a guide to discover primary sources. Read the arguments these people made directly and come to your own conclusions about their validity.
October 7, 2019
'Seen from a sufficient distance, the Bitcoin machine is revealed as the built-out version of one of the most abstract fantasies of value ever conceived. It does not make data valuable - only humans and their institutions, accepting payment, thinking of past and future, can do that - but it does make a certain kind of data verifiably rare, and therefore suitable for hoarding, display, begging, conspicuous waste, and status competition. It may well be the purest and most honest expression of a society that could not figure out what to do with its technological inventiveness - its energy, innovation, and abundance - except to squander it in creating new kinds of artificial scarcity: the monumental folly of our age.'
Incredible writing being done nowadays by assistant professors no longer taken hostage by inhibiting dreams of future tenure.
Incredible writing being done nowadays by assistant professors no longer taken hostage by inhibiting dreams of future tenure.
December 20, 2021
I really wanted to like this book, but I realized I couldn't. Then, I really wanted to finish the book, even if merely by skimming. But in the end, I had to give up.
Unless you want to read a 200+ page academic paper with a much lower signal to noise ratio, skip this read. The prose is dense, laden with academic jargon and highbrow allusions. Incredibly hard to follow and connect the ideas littered across a wasteland of punctuation. I guess one way to encrypt your ideas is to make them unbearable to read ;)
The one interesting concept I picked up from Brunton's work was actually cited from other scholars (sometimes chapters read like lit reviews, so it's not particularly surprising). The idea is that money is a cosmogram - a sort of artifact from the future, carrying a collective expectation around how society will evolve in its structures and values. Seeing money a sort of "societal bet" on the future helped me understand the long history of speculative currencies — they are speculative not only due to their risk, but because of their vision.
Unless you want to read a 200+ page academic paper with a much lower signal to noise ratio, skip this read. The prose is dense, laden with academic jargon and highbrow allusions. Incredibly hard to follow and connect the ideas littered across a wasteland of punctuation. I guess one way to encrypt your ideas is to make them unbearable to read ;)
The one interesting concept I picked up from Brunton's work was actually cited from other scholars (sometimes chapters read like lit reviews, so it's not particularly surprising). The idea is that money is a cosmogram - a sort of artifact from the future, carrying a collective expectation around how society will evolve in its structures and values. Seeing money a sort of "societal bet" on the future helped me understand the long history of speculative currencies — they are speculative not only due to their risk, but because of their vision.
July 21, 2019
91st book for 2019.
An interesting cultural history of the rise to digital currencies.
With Facebook with plans for launching its own GlobalCoin currency in 2020, it's interesting to be reminded of the Randian/Extropian/Libertarian/Anarchic background to the birth of BitCoin and the like.
3-stars.
An interesting cultural history of the rise to digital currencies.
With Facebook with plans for launching its own GlobalCoin currency in 2020, it's interesting to be reminded of the Randian/Extropian/Libertarian/Anarchic background to the birth of BitCoin and the like.
3-stars.
October 19, 2019
some of the history in this book gets lost in the weeds of technological developments and different groups, but I love the portions about crypto and philosophies of money. The book is worth reading just for the last paragraph.
July 30, 2022
Cryptocurrencies were certainly not delivered by an UFO to Earthlings, but it didn't make much difference. The book presents a rollercoaster ride containing a bunch of libertarian anarchists and political radicals that dream about the near apocalypse and want to hasten that certain future (in their eyes) a bit by creating a cryptographic cash that would safe them from tyranny. Add a bit of cryonics, with the big question to how transfer money to your distant regenerated self, and extra points for the Xanadu project that wants to monetize knowledge for quadrillions of endusers in the next few billion years.
American West-Coasters have some talent to combine brilliant mathematical minds with a seemingly rational but very dystopian worldview. In this mix, somewhere after many attempts over decades, a pseudonym with the name of Nakamoto combined the existing technologies into something we know today as bitcoin.
Don't read this book to learn about the how (technology) but about the why.
I discovered this book via Rosenthals seminar 'Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies’ Externalities' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twrdu...
American West-Coasters have some talent to combine brilliant mathematical minds with a seemingly rational but very dystopian worldview. In this mix, somewhere after many attempts over decades, a pseudonym with the name of Nakamoto combined the existing technologies into something we know today as bitcoin.
Don't read this book to learn about the how (technology) but about the why.
I discovered this book via Rosenthals seminar 'Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies’ Externalities' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twrdu...
July 15, 2019
There are some issues with technical accuracy in parts, but this never pretended to be a technical book. It is, however, a nice blast from the past of things I remember from back in the day -Extropianism, Cypherpunks, etc. It's a good high level history of a fascinating and often overlooked era, and I hope it leads to additional volumes with even more detail.
December 6, 2023
This book is a fascinating journey through a host of niche, at times bizarre alt-future visions that have largely fallen by the wayside. Brunton does an excellent job of plumbing the depths of the highly specific tech-libertarian ethos that developed in conjunction with the early Internet that culminated (so to speak) in the launch of Bitcoin in 2009. Along the way, the reader explores this movement's ties to Hayek and the Austrian School and how those theories motivated online proponents of alt-currencies, and we get several entertaining stops along the way at such colorful places as the world of biostasis at cryonics facilities in the Arizona desert, Snowcrash-style cypherpunk meetups in 1990s chat rooms, and Sealand, among others. The book effectively draws together these elements into a coherent story of a movement with very specific goals in mind as - Bitcoin among them. From a certain perspective, this narrative presents Bitcoin's ideal role as the currency-in-waiting of a techno-millenarian movement itching for society to collapse already so they can hurry up and reach the ideal, post-social future.
That said, I seem to share the author's inherent skepticism about the ultimate utility of Bitcoin, a surprisingly interest thought experiment with little apparent benefit to society (small wonder for a "currency" designed for optimal use after society's collapse), which he summarized as follows: "Seen from a sufficient distance, the Bitcoin machine is revealed as the built-out version of one of the most abstract fantasies of value ever conceived. It does not make data valuable - only humans and their institutions, accepting payments, thinking of past and future, can do that - but it does make a certain kind of data verifiably rare, and therefore suitable for hoarding, display, begging, conspicuous waste, and status competition. It may well be the purest and most honest expression of a society that could not figure out what to do with its technological inventiveness - its energy, innovation, and abundance - except to squander it in creating new kinds of artificial scarcity." Well said.
That said, I seem to share the author's inherent skepticism about the ultimate utility of Bitcoin, a surprisingly interest thought experiment with little apparent benefit to society (small wonder for a "currency" designed for optimal use after society's collapse), which he summarized as follows: "Seen from a sufficient distance, the Bitcoin machine is revealed as the built-out version of one of the most abstract fantasies of value ever conceived. It does not make data valuable - only humans and their institutions, accepting payments, thinking of past and future, can do that - but it does make a certain kind of data verifiably rare, and therefore suitable for hoarding, display, begging, conspicuous waste, and status competition. It may well be the purest and most honest expression of a society that could not figure out what to do with its technological inventiveness - its energy, innovation, and abundance - except to squander it in creating new kinds of artificial scarcity." Well said.
December 4, 2021
The first few chapters and last chapters are the best part of the book. In these chapters, the author provides some of the philosophy and historical background of the anarchists, utopians, and other sociological influences motivating creators to bring digital currency into existence. There are worldviews that have pushed the development of cryptocurrencies for decades and the author provides insight into the various perspectives that have led to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies and failed predecessors.
The middle of the book is a slog and feels like reading combined research papers on Extropians and Friedrich Hayek. If you want a deep dive into the early cypherpunk movement, cryogenic utopians, and pioneers in the crypto-technologies, you'll enjoy this research. The insights in the first two chapters provide a great framework for the development of cryptocurrencies but after that, the book takes a deep dive that may more biography and intricate history than the average cryptocurrency investor may want to read.
The middle of the book is a slog and feels like reading combined research papers on Extropians and Friedrich Hayek. If you want a deep dive into the early cypherpunk movement, cryogenic utopians, and pioneers in the crypto-technologies, you'll enjoy this research. The insights in the first two chapters provide a great framework for the development of cryptocurrencies but after that, the book takes a deep dive that may more biography and intricate history than the average cryptocurrency investor may want to read.
October 27, 2022
I had a hard time understanding the computer programming described in this book. However, I understood the psychology of the developers very well. The original creators of digital cash were anarchists, who believed that if they could conduct transactions completely invisible to government, all the governments would fall. They didn't seem to consider who would protect them and provide necessary services like road repair if all governments fell, but those who are totally unable to live in society and demand their own rights with no responsibilities can't be counted on to think out all the consequences of their actions. From there, the nature of digital cash evolved until finally we have Bitcoin. Mr. Brunton writes about the malevolence of those involved, that many of them consider themselves superior beings who shouldn't be hampered by laws and rules so that they can create more and more wonderful things. He correctly notes this philosophy is Nietzschean. Those who are mining for Bitcoin use a tremendous amount of increasingly expensive electricity to run many computers and cooling fans while generating hardly anything of use. Some of them even hope to escape death, having themselves cryonically frozen until what killed them is finally cured and they can be revived again. I wonder if they have considered that the people of the future may be so disgusted with the philosophy of those who are frozen that the people of the future will have no interest in reviving them.
July 4, 2019
Extremely readable with a fairly tight narrative arc covering the community of people who were responsible for both the technological and philosophical aspects of Bitcoin and its forerunners. Gets some of the technical detail wrong regarding hash collisions in the chapter explaining that aspect of the technology undergirding various digital cash and/or PoW schemes, but as the book is largely non-technical and primarily a history, this doesn't really detract from it much. Even for someone who has spent a good deal of time researching cryptocurrency technology, this will likely contain some interesting bits of info, and was very enjoyable overall.
October 4, 2020
This is one of the best narration of the pre-Bitcoin era. Most Bitcoin narratives intentionally or not ignore the utopian and long-lasting attempts in the previous decades. Just to give an idea; an excerpt:
"...the earliest experiments with “objects made in new ways,” blinded e- cash, the CryptoCredits of BlackNet; hashcash and bit gold, RPOW and b- money; Ex- tropian idea coupons and thornes and hayek note sketches; libertarian coinage and certificate..."
Immediately became one of my favorites...
"...the earliest experiments with “objects made in new ways,” blinded e- cash, the CryptoCredits of BlackNet; hashcash and bit gold, RPOW and b- money; Ex- tropian idea coupons and thornes and hayek note sketches; libertarian coinage and certificate..."
Immediately became one of my favorites...
April 21, 2020
It's almost impressive that the author could make such interesting characters and history banal... But he did.
Also written with a clear and pervasive intellectual bias which makes it at times almost unreadable.
Also written with a clear and pervasive intellectual bias which makes it at times almost unreadable.
February 26, 2022
Eloquently phrased personal opinions. Nothing more.
It is sad that this kind of journalism proliferates today. Mixing every other personal opinion with factual nuggets does not make a story factual or true.
Should have stuck to history.
It is sad that this kind of journalism proliferates today. Mixing every other personal opinion with factual nuggets does not make a story factual or true.
Should have stuck to history.
October 3, 2019
Good follow up to David Graeber's "Debt"
December 29, 2019
The real life story(ies) behind Neal Stephenson's Crypotican?
February 10, 2020
The book went in all directions to come to the Bitcoin bit, forgive the pun, at the end of the book.. maybe the last 10 pages.
April 14, 2020
A wonderful and unique study of the intersection between technology and culture that gave us bitcoin. This read is short and at times dense, but educational and confounding.
April 19, 2020
An interesting examination of currency and the origins of cyber currency. More history and philosophy than a tutorial on cyber currency I was looking for
May 24, 2020
I enjoyed the content, but the author seems more concerned with flexing his vocabulary than he is with clearing conveying information.
cosmogram.
cosmogram.
June 21, 2021
Some interesting stories but lacks a coherent focus.
Want to read
January 13, 2022 A reboot recommendation
February 12, 2022
8 out of 10
December 22, 2023
Excellent lesson in the historical importance of events of the past which influenced the world of digital economics and currencies as we understand them today.
April 21, 2023
I thought I would find the subject detailed in the subtitle intriguing, but I did not. I will wait for a better-written account of the subjects.
June 23, 2022
an interested potted history of how we landed up where we are and what is considered crypto and other kinds of money
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