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Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency Hardcover – June 25, 2019

by Finn Brunton (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars 59 ratings
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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.

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  1. Print length
    272 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Princeton University Press
  4. Publication date
    June 25, 2019
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 1 x 8.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0691179492
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0691179490
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

Review

“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

"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

"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

“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

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 25, 2019
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691179492
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691179490
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 out of 5 stars 59 ratings

About the author

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Finn Brunton

Finn Brunton

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I’m an Assistant Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. Along with my books (working on the next two now!) I write for Radical Philosophy, Artforum, and other scholarly and popular venues.

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4.1 out of 5 stars
59 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Bryan Pfaffenberger
    5.0 out of 5 stars Essential guide to the fascinating history and meaning of digital cash
    Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2019
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    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.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • John L. Boeger
    4.0 out of 5 stars 5 years after first reading it, it's still the first book I recommend
    Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2024
    Format: Paperback
    5 years after first reading Digital Cash, it's still the first book I recommend to people who want LEARN about Bitcoin in a historical context. Covers key concepts one should understand about Bitcoin such as encryption and Proof of Work and Bitcoin as stored energy... a concept from the steampunk era!
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  • Luckycat
    5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent, excellent book!
    Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2020
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    This book is fascinating. It clearly describes the people (e.g., David Chaum, Adam Back, Hal Finney and Wei Dai) and products (e.g., E-cash, hashcash and b-money) that have brought us to where we are today. It reminds us that the way the world is when we were born is not necessarily the best world possible. It is full of mind-expanding concepts: like (as Hal Finney pointed out in 2002) money is "fundamentally a form of information," "money is not about atoms, it is about bits," and the view that money is based on material goods is "old-fashioned." Finn Brunton knocked it out of the park.
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  • Daniel Archer
    1.0 out of 5 stars Complex to read, won’t appeal to the average reader.
    Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2020
    Format: Kindle
    Tried on multiple attempts to read this book, however found the style far too complex to understand what was trying to be conveyed. I have a technical understanding of cryptocurrency but was disappointed with how confusing every sentence was to read. Might appeal to a handful of professors but not your average reader interested in this subject.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Göran
    2.0 out of 5 stars Eloquently phrased personal opinions. Nothing more.
    Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2022
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    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.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Pablo Lema
    1.0 out of 5 stars Don't Buy It
    Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2019
    Format: Hardcover
    A pedantic take on digital cash (which is an infinitely interesting topic). Will wander on philosophical tangents for no reason, but most frustrating, insists on using complex terminology where simple terms will do. A fraud of intellectualism.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • pconneely
    2.0 out of 5 stars Lol
    Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2020
    Format: Hardcover
    It’s reads in the same manner in which you get a sense of someone you are speaking with is trying to go over the top in giving the guise of being more educated or superior than they are through the use of unnecessarily complex language. I picked up this book not on amazon but in a well-known and well-curated LA bookstore. It was placed in the section reserved for conspiracy theories, alternative topics and more ‘mind bending’ subjects. T appeared to be a pretty straightforward history of alt currency, which I thought would be interesting. After reading it I feel frustrated and annoyed that there are so many other more coherent, non-rambling books on the topic and I chose to give this one a fair shake by seeing it through to the end. I was so annoyed by the presentation of the material that I had to learn more about the author and found that he has glowingly positive reviews as a professor, 99.9% of are focused on how easy his classes are with no work. If you think I’m exaggerating, look him up on YouTube and I dare you to last more than two minutes with his nonsense . Two stars bc I learned a few things and bc I’m saving my first one star for an extremely steaming load and this was only partially steaming.
    9 people found this helpful
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  • fdoamerica
    2.0 out of 5 stars Not an easy read for the layperson/proletariat who just wants to understand
    Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2019
    Format: Hardcover
    This was a hard read for me. I found Finn Brunton's writing style dense, disjointed and akin to an economics professor I had who spoke facing the blackboard and got lost in his own words. An easier read, if you want to understand cryptocurrency, is Paul Vigna's "The Age of Cryptocurrency". Digital Cash "an unknown history... " remained unknown for me.
    4 people found this helpful
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