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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 exchanged but not copied, created but not forged, 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.… (más)
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. ( )
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” she said. “But does she tell the truth?” “Of course not,” said Lil. “She tells the future. It’s not the same thing, you know.” —Boris Vian, Red Grass, trans. Paul Knobloch
I’m trying to get root access to the future. I want to raid its system of thought. —Jude Milhon
Dedicatoria
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
This book tells the largely untold story of digital cash and the people who sought to build it—some to bring down states and nations and create a utopia of ciphers, some to be rewarded by the collapse of global order, and some to spur the genesis of a machine by which they could live forever.
Citas
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The solemn faces of politicians, monarchs, and cultural grandees gaze at us anew from exoskeletal body armor and lapidary helmets, wearing garlands of flowers and leaves, with curling clouds and flaming halos like a Tibetan Buddhist thangka: they look like portraits of shamans and seraphim from a place simultaneously ancient and utterly futuristic—envoys from utopia.
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 exchanged but not copied, created but not forged, 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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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. (