What the Wild History of Digital Currency Tells Us About The Future

Finn Brunton is an assistant professor at NYU and the author of Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency and Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet.

How does Libra resemble a central bank? What role did the Soviet Union have in the development of credit cards? Why did a desire to live forever drive forward the creation of digital currencies?

In his latest book, Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency, Brunton yokes together seemingly heterogenous subcultures and ideas to tell the untold story of cryptocurrency's emergence.

As a historian, I realized I had found a way to approach the subject of digital money.

A lot of the people who are working on the earliest stages of digital cash were preparing for when most of the economy and commerce goes digital, so everyone would be under surveillance and coercion at a level never really seen before.

That's the context when we see the need for digital currency [bitcoin] appear.

What's your favorite subculture working on digital cash?

The people working on cryptocurrency at the beginning were also generally working on cryptography, so they knew how easy digital surveillance was and how hard the government was fighting to keep strong cryptography out of the hands of ordinary people.

There are reportedly ongoing experiments at the Federal Reserve with digital dollars.

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