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Title details for Digital Cash by Finn Brunton - Available

Digital Cash

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

by Finn Brunton
Christopher Ragland
Audiobook
2 of 3 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
2 of 3 copies available
In this audiobook, Christopher Ragland narrates the fascinating untold story of digital cash and its creators, from experiments in the 1970s to the mania over Bitcoin 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 25, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780691193502
      • File size: 206268 KB
      • Duration: 07:09:43

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      May 15, 2019
      Cryptocurrencies have taken off in the past decade, with systems like Bitcoin skyrocketing in value since their introduction, but the story of digital money goes back to the creation of money itself. In this in-depth exploration of the technology, Brunton (Obfuscation, 2015) presents the history behind digital currency, discussing the challenges and ideologies that shape it. In constructing these intangible forms of payment, he explains, technocrats, cypherpunks, and other technologists encoded a whole new world of possibilities into being. Large-scale adoption would mean completely changed economies and whole new sets of values, and breakthroughs in authentication and encryption brought their dreams closer to fruition. Now . . . money could be used to speculate as a cultural project that acts not only as a stake in the future but as an artifact from it. Guiding readers through the philosophies at the foundation of early cryptocurrencies, Brunton examines the evolution of computing innovations that led to the digital cash used today. An enlightening take on the predicted futures that are shaping our present lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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