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How could we create a digital equivalent to cash, somethingthat could be created but not forged, exchanged but not copied, and whichreveals nothing about itsusers?

Why would we need this digital currency?

Dr. Finn Brunton, Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, discussed his new book Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency on November 19th, 2019 with CITPs Technology and Society Reading Group. Footage aired on C-SPANs Book TV.

Through a series of how and why questions, Finn constructed a fascinating and critical narrative around the history of digital currencies and the emergence of modern cryptocurrency. How much currency should be produced? How do we know if currency is real? Why gold, relative to digital gold currencies (DGCs)?

Beginning with the $20 bill, as analog beautiful objects of government technology made possible in a digital era by the rose engine lathe, and ending with the first ever tweet about Bitcoin (Running bitcoin), posted by Hal Finney (@halfin), Finn described the unexpected sociotechnical origins of Bitcoin and blockchain. His talk, and the book on which it was based, identify seminal articles (e.g. The Computers of Tomorrow by Martin Greenberger) and discussion communities (e.g. Extropy), key figures from David Chaum and Paul Armer to Tim May and Phil Salin, and digital currencies, from EFTs to hashcash, that served as stepping stones toward contemporary cryptocurrencies. Yet, Finn also importantly acknowledged that while names and dates are memorable and compelling in constructing a timeline and pulling continuous threads through this history, there are n+1 ideas about and versions of digital currency.

In this sense, Finn provides, more so than an attempt at acomprehensive chronology, a sense of the recurring objectives that motivatedthe evolution of cryptocurrency: trust in value, exchangeability, multiplicity,reproducibility, decentralization, abundance, scalability, sovereignty,verification, authenticity, fungibility, and transparency. In addition to thesemany, often fundamentally conflicting, values and objectives, very realconcerns about privacy, surveillance, coercion, power asymmetries, and libertarianfears of crises and the coming emergencies led individuals and communities todevelop their own digital currencies. Finn also identified some of theproblematic narratives around digital currencies, such as the assertion that cryptocurrencyis as real as math, and real challenges that have stymied and limited variousexperimental currencies.

Many of these challenges were highly apparent as Finndescribed the rise and fall of DGCs. The strange union between futuristicdigital currency and precious metals, particularly gold in its magnificent,stupid honesty, emerged in many parallel libertarian communities in the US andaround the world, as digital and analog receipts of ownership in preciousmetals were distributed to document remote stored value in a decentralizedsystem. Finn explained how these DGCs (e.g. eLiberty Dollars or The SecondAmendment Dollar) challenged the power and authority of state currencies andmodern banking and how the abrupt seizure of precious metal stockpiles, asevidence, by Federal Marshals foreshadowed some of the inaccessibility problemsof cryptocurrency, as well as the relationships between illicit activities anddigital currencies which now exist on the Silk Road.

Finn ended the discussion answering audience questions,including about power dynamics and the libertarian origins of cryptocurrency.His assertion that money and crisis are linked, not only in the economy ofemergency preparedness, but also in key points of progress toward the futureof money is compelling in identifying how digital currencies fit into thishistorical pattern in a larger monetary history.

See the rest here:
The Unknown History of Digital Cash - Freedom to Tinker