#bookstr Just finished the amazing “Digital Cash” by Finn Brunton, a book I found myself highlighting more than any recent non-fiction read.
Brunton provides a fascinating social-ideological anthropology of the hackers, cypherpunks and Extropians who were at the heart of the creation of the many strains of digital money that ultimately crystallized into Bitcoin in 2008. To do this, he goes all the way back to the 1930’s with obscure futurist movements like “the Technocracy,” tracing these forward to early hypertext projects like Xanadu in the 1970’s, and ultimately to smoky San Francisco bars in the early 90’s occupied by mask-wearing cypherpunks planning the downfall of the Nation-State.
What was new to me was just how intermeshed the early cypherpunk community was with the transhumanist “Extropian” movement. Digital money wasn’t just a means of escaping and de-legitimizing State control; it was money you could “take with you” when you get cryopreserved, as Hal Finney did. Password-protected digital coins could be loaded “in your brain” for the passage to the future, like the coins placed on the mouth of dead Greeks for Charon to ferry them across the river Styx.
The story takes us right up to Bitcoin’s inception in 2008, and I would love to hear a continuation of all the high-stakes drama both inside Bitcoin culture and directly adjacent, such as the geopolitical moves of Assange, Taaki, Ulbricht, & etc. But that’s another story for another time!
In an era where Bitcoiners wear ties and MAGA hats, and extol the virtues of pastoral living, it’s important to be continually reminded of the truly radical nature of this stuff. This is money for a radical vision of the future, made by humans who sought to transcend the limits of humanity itself.
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