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

Review\n"[Digital Cash] is quite a ride, from cryptographer David Chaum's failed DigiCash initiative of 1989 through to the bitcoin saga."―Barbara Kiser, Nature\n"Digital Cash is a good book. Even experienced denizens of the cryptocurrency space are likely to learn something from it."―Sonya Mann, Reason\n"Beautifully written and meticulously researched."―Rachel O'Dwyer, Science\n"The best book I’ve read this year so far."―Joe Weisenthal, Bloomberg Markets\n"[Brunton] brings to life the history of efforts to synthesize money out of math and electrons . . . Digital Cash is stocked with colorful characters."―Kevin Werbach, Los Angeles Review of Books\nThe fascinating untold story of digital cash and its creators―from experiments in the 1970s to the mania over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies\nBitcoin 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: to protect privacy, bring down governments, prepare for apocalypse, or launch a civilization of innovation and abundance that would make its creators immortal. 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.