We discover the cypherpunk model of radical money in the 1980s and 1990s, with crypto anarchists, the American Information Exchange, and the Xanadu project all trying to make digital data valuable in itself—and laying the foundations of subsequent marketplaces. Creating truly autonomous digital cash meant solving three fundamental problems: coordination, duplication, and adoption. This chapter explains the first two problems, introducing visions of what a digital cash future could look like.
In 1992, on Friday, September 25, at a club called the Black Hole in San Francisco, StJude met ambassadors from the future.1
She knew they were figures from a world to come, members of “the revolution which is, heh, already in progress,” because they were opaque and anonymous. They wore chadors and “three-eyed” goggles; when they talked, it was through vocoders that filtered and synthesized their voices into saxophones and cellos, Kraftwerk croaks and sawtooth speech, rendered unrecognizable and broadcast through head-mounted speakers. And not only their voices: other people spoke through their speakers as theremins and rushing water. The third-eye goggle was a lens transmitting to a networked community. “People are ringing in and out.” When she told a joke, the chadors echoed with “orchestral chuckles” from many time zones. “Was I an international hit?” she wondered.
The ambassadors towered over her, both exactly the same height: they wore cothurni, thick-soled weighted shoes with concealed lifts. They lurched around like deep-sea divers in their lead boots, their costume interfering with any distinctive gait or gesture. As they loomed out of the smoke in the Black Hole—a club from which not even a photon of information could escape—she had them pegged: “I think you’re crypto anarchists—what I’d call cypherpunks! … You want to take over the world.” A cello with a Dutch accent, nettled, disagreed: “We don’t believe in takeovers. In fact, we are working to make things UNTAKEOVERABLE.”
The two chadors and the “many overlapping voices” that talked through them—who knows which voices in particular belonged to the bodies under the yards of black cloth—outlined their project: pseudonymous economies, with “encrypted EVERYTHING,” online reputations and a distributed credit rating system, secure digital money in “Swiss bank accounts for the millions.” It added up, said a theremin, to a “global monetary system that makes governments obsolete.”
“No, I’m not quite delusional,” StJude wrote. She had met the cypherpunks; in fact, she’d given them that name. It took place in lucid coastal California light in Berkeley the previous Saturday, in a private home, not the smoky “near dark” of the Black Hole club. But she got the reality of the situation across with her fictional account of polyphonic network-attached silhouettes, blank inkblots with spiked gloves, stun guns, and encryption schemes. “A definitely false rumor,” she said in her closing line: “the revolutionists can be contacted via cypherpunks@toad.com”—a real address for a real mailing list, started that very week, on which she was circulating the first draft of her story.
Decades previously, Jude “StJude” Milhon cofounded Community Memory, a very early digital social network, with teletype keyboards set up in the back of a record store and a public library.2 Community Memory hosted a thriving scene of pseudonymous characters like “Dr. Benway,” who hammered out Burroughsian riffs, live broadcasts from the Interzone. The bare-bones system didn’t have anything like a login, so anybody could write as Benway—or as anyone else. “Certain nefarious pirates have spoken of cloning the Benway Logo,” said the original author. “Go right ahead … it’s public domain.”3 What difference does it make who’s talking through those speakers, under that name? “One of Jude’s philosophies,” wrote a friend after Milhon passed away in 2003, “was that you shouldn’t have to tell the world who you were.”4
“So you’re protecting your meat identity, right?” asked StJude of one of the chadors in the Black Hole, and, simultaneously, of her actual audience: her newly christened “cypherpunks.”5 “Clarifications, expansions, corrections are welcome. Also abuse and threats, for that matter.” She was writing the story, “The Cypherpunk Movement,” for “Irresponsible Journalism,” her column in the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000. (Mondo was Wired’s anarchic older sister, with hoaxes, band interviews, and fashion shoots running alongside pieces on virtual reality, psychedelics, encryption, and experimental fiction.) She addressed the draft to the people who inspired it, the earliest members of the “cypherpunks@toad.com” mailing list, the group who had physically assembled in Eric Hughes’s house the week before at the inaugural meeting. Milhon had been there, taking notes on the ideas, and now was “concerned only that they be correct and clearly stated”—and that she captured the feel of the future being explored there, an order built on cryptography, pseudonymity, and “secure digital money.” “Down come the governments,” whooped the theremin from the looming, opaque shadow.
Timothy C. May had been at that Saturday meeting in Berkeley with StJude, where a loose crew of engineers, programmers, and cryptographic enthusiasts became cypherpunks.
He was a retired engineer—retired at 34, after careful calculation of how much money he would need to remain independent for the rest of his life. At Intel he had solved a famously subtle problem involving errors in microchips produced by the alpha particle emissions of their ceramic casings. He had a physicist’s sense of the stubborn facticity of the universe—radioactivity is radioactivity, whether or not humans are aware of it in a pile of sand or a piece of quartz—and a sardonic contempt for the flakiness that characterized humans and their machines alike. In the alpha particle paper, after pages of precise evidence and argument about chip design and radioactive decay, the last sentence was, “From the human engineering point of view, it is somewhat gratifying to note that the microcomputer controlled robots of the twenty-first Century may be plagued by some of the same ills that befall human beings; robots may be as fallible as mortals.”6
Like most people who spent time online in those days, May had a signature block, a .sig file: a chunk of text that would be automatically appended to his emails and posts to forums and threads. Signature blocks were a place for phone numbers, affiliations, in-jokes, and bits of ASCII art. (Another participant in the cypherpunks mailing list, Julian Assange, included a sardonic Nixon quote in his sig.7) May’s sig had a Talking Heads lyric, a math pun involving the then-largest known prime number, and a timeline of the future, a science fiction story in miniature: “Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments.”
It was an inventory of components, a list of interests, and a chronicle of an imagined future—things to come, credited in order of appearance. We can rewrite it as the story of the dawn of the prospective Crypto Anarchist Age: a set of fundamental breakthroughs in encryption and decades of engineering and research funded by the government now enables its destruction. Experiments with anonymous networks and digital pseudonyms, zero-knowledge systems, and reputations provide the infrastructure for digital cash. What is needed is a proof-of-concept information marketplace that can demonstrate these components at work, attracting and educating new users. This would enable the creation of global, networked black markets of untraceable, untaxable commerce, after which governments, of necessity, would collapse.
His job was to make this story come true. He could not do it by himself. He needed partners, a movement, a vanguard conspiracy of mathematicians. “A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy,” he read to the group that had assembled that Saturday in September, Jude Milhon among them: this was the opening line of his “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”
From their first meeting, the cypherpunk community existed in several kinds of overlapping time. They made reasonable guesses: “As soon as there is money flowing through the networks which is tied only to pseudonyms and not to physical people, then you’ll see a lot more virtual-only identities.”8 They speculated about things like “Spatial VR” as a kind of residence on the “Permanent Frontier.” They looked for signals of the future in their own adoption of the techniques and technologies that would, one day, scale to the millions and billions on the network. “What we are discussing are long-range implications of these ideas.”9
The subtlest and most significant historical condition of the cypherpunk project was its untimeliness. It was untimely not only in the classic Nietzschean sense, making a project in advance of its own historical context, but also in the sense of being too slow. There was a distinct lag between the proof of cryptographic primitives (low-level, reliable algorithms) and their implementation into a working system. “Why have most of the things Cypherpunks talk about *not* happened?” asked May.10 The very manifesto he read at the first cypherpunk meeting that Saturday was four years old, having been circulated among “like-minded techno-anarchists” in 1988, 1989, and 1990. “For historical reasons I’ll just leave it as is.”11 We are “on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner”; why was it taking so long?12
Progress could be made in areas like email, with a set of widely accepted common protocols, but “the situation becomes much murkier for things like digital money, which are not standalone objects and are often multi-party protocols involving time delays, offline processing, etc.”13 Building digital cash was both technically complex and semantically confusing. “While it’s fairly clear what ‘encrypting’ or ‘remailing’ means,” wrote May, “just what is a ‘digital bank’?”14 It’s one thing to discuss—say—the vulnerabilities of email or the strengths and weaknesses of different cryptosystems, but money is an implicit set of assertions about value, time, history, and social structure. What you mean by a “digital bank” is part of a cosmogram, a way of knowing, organizing, and explaining the world. Defining it is a project of consensus building that precedes the consensus on programming languages, databases, formats, collaboration tools, and versioning systems that you need to actually start getting code together.
Building a digital bank is a deep problem of coordination, one commonly solved—in Yochai Benkler’s terms about the work of making free and open source software—by price systems or managerial structure.15 You can have a marketplace that rewards and incentivizes certain kinds of activities, or you can have firms or institutions that pay salaries, assemble teams, and give orders: two different but compatible ways of getting a bunch of people heading in more or less the same direction. Building a digital banking platform would normally take place within the command architecture of Visa or the Federal Reserve or some other large institution with a mandate, office space, and a tier of project managers or executives to resolve internal conflicts. The cypherpunks, by contrast, had an informal double-digit gang of very smart people and a mailing list. “We on this list are not being paid to develop anything, are not assisted by anyone, and don’t have the financial backing of corporations to assist us.”16
The story of free and open source software is the story of new technological communities overcoming exactly those odds to build everything from operating systems to the server platforms on which much of the Internet relies. While all of those projects featured the endless, internecine bickering that open source efforts generate like sawdust from a lumber mill, the complexity of the conversation required to create something like a digital bank was of a different order. It didn’t start from fun technical questions but from philosophical and social commitments on authority, sovereignty, and the nature of value.
The situation was far too urgent for that long, slow dialogue, out of which consensus might never emerge. Perhaps you could pull together a critical mass of contributors, users, and participants to push one of these schemes along? If you could get to the stage Hughes identified—“money flowing through the networks … tied only to pseudonyms and not to physical people”—the system would be self-sustaining, with a population incentivized by a new kind of price system to support and build it.17 They would have achieved a state of being passing current. With enough people, you could build that kind of literal and figurative buy-in, which was not just a matter of building technologies, but of telling stories.
A chapter in the story May wanted to tell—the story of the victory of digital cash and the collapse of governments—was the rise of the “information markets,” which would create a platform for valuable data and an economic context for digital cash. How could the online information marketplace get off the ground? Two closely related companies in May’s orbit tried to answer this question, and their systems, promises, and partners would shape what became digital cash. The first of the two was the American Information Exchange, founded by Phillip Salin. May’s first discussion of the crypto anarchy project with a like-minded group, in 1988, happened in Salin’s living room.18
Phillip Salin lived at one end of a road a hundred miles long: it ran straight up from anywhere he stood to outside the planet’s atmosphere. He mapped out a trajectory from Palo Alto to low Earth orbit. His team at Arc Technologies—later Starstruck, as in “a truck to the stars,” and finally the American Rocket Company under new management—experimented with sugar-based “rocket candy” fuel for less expensive launch vehicles and lived off funds invested by Michael Scott, the first CEO of Apple Computer. Salin wasn’t an aerospace engineer, though; he was an economics wonk with an MBA, a devotee of the market-centric Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek, a believer in the power of market operations alone to drive change. Salin thought the greatest challenge the space future faced was a force more powerful than gravity or the strain tolerance of metals: misallocated money.
The Shuttle was too cheap, he argued before a congressional committee: its costs were subsidized and artificially depressed, discouraging the entrepreneurial rocket industry.19 The movement of money alone could get us out of the gravity well: “The next great breakthroughs in space will be economic breakthroughs,” he testified.20 Salin was fascinated by marketplaces for information, by the circulation of money and knowledge—money as information, and information as money.
In 1984, as the business of space was running into trouble, Salin started a project he had been contemplating since the 1970s, when he was reading Hayek and Karl Popper and working on time-sharing computer systems: a digital marketplace for intellectual property. He called it the American Information Exchange, AMIX, envisioning it as a place to retail all kinds of brainwork. It would provide you not merely with information but with answers: surveys, market analysis, patents, floor plans, CAD renderings, solutions to problems, formulas. “We’re just trying,” Salin said, “to reduce the friction and transaction costs that keep people from trading their knowledge for gain.”21
To do this, they had to build an auction and sales system with profiles and ratings and comments and market managers for the new profession of “information broker.” They needed a platform to handle accounting and billing and transactions and payments. They needed personal computers across the United States running the custom AMIX software (which even a puff piece described as “cumbersome”) so every customer could dial into Unix servers storing an array of topics, subtopics, and items encompassing the whole specialized world of potential information products and services.22 The team at AMIX, as the technology journalist Doc Searls recalled, was “trying to create an online service from scratch,” a bespoke version of the whole infrastructure the Internet itself would later provide. “Phil had to create his own Internet.”23 Prior even to solving those problems, though, AMIX had to explain why digital information was valuable.
Esther Dyson put the objection simply in 1990: “The law of supply and demand can’t work for a product, such as information, that can be replicated at almost no cost.”24 Dyson was then primarily an industry journalist for the computing boom and an advocate for the development of digital information marketplaces. There was a problem with these potentially perfect cyberlibertarian markets, and it lay at the heart of Salin’s business plan. Dyson wrote repeatedly about AMIX, trying to answer the recurring objection about the value of digital media: “Once it is created, it can be replicated almost costlessly.”25
Back in 1972, the peripatetic writer and artist-activist Stewart Brand—of the Whole Earth Access Catalog, among other ventures—spent time with the subculture of “computer bums” writing code and playing an early video game called Spacewar!26 He laid out the implications of digitizing analog media with the clarity of dawn: “Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with ‘essentially perfect fidelity.’ So much for record stores (in present form).”27 His phrasing is inapt in an important way, a mistake of semantics we continue to commonly make today. His musicologists aren’t “swapping” records, trading them back and forth—they’re making records, since each copy (on my computer, on yours, stored on the server, in local cache storage, on a music-playing device) is a perfect bit-for-bit copy unless we do something deliberate to filter, compress, or alter it.28
Much of the technical history of computing and telecommunications in the twentieth century is the history of the challenge of fidelity, of accuracy and error correction: to store and transmit perfect copies using imperfect media and noisy channels, from telephone lines to radio waves to the wiring between a single computer’s storage, processing, and display.29 The work of computing, especially networked computing, can be told as the creation of a global era of copying machines whose capacity for replication far exceeds printing and photography.30 The facing page of Dyson’s column on AMIX in Forbes was a full-page ad for Xerox, celebrating a “National Quality Award” in its role as “The Document Company”: like Konrad Zuse’s earliest computer programs, which used digital instructions punched into old 35 mm movie film, here two different media systems were neatly juxtaposed.31
This was another step in the ongoing, multicentury crisis of the concept of “intellectual property”; the digital turn enabled new answers to the old questions of how and why and in what ways information is valuable.32 Salin’s answer, in the framework of AMIX, had a deceptive, market-driven simplicity: digital information is valuable because people will pay for it. Who knows which information and why? “Juan’s common knowledge is Alice’s electrifying discovery,” Dyson wrote in one of her essays on the AMIX idea. “Let the market decide.”33 But this answer included a deeper question. AMIX was indeed a marketplace: a transaction and payment platform for digital information. “Digital information” was coming to include money itself, the thing paid. What made the digital money of the digital marketplace valuable?34
The same mechanisms that enabled the transmission and storage of information as a swiftly verifiable string of bits, moving from account to account, put the money thus transacted on the thinnest ontological ice. Tim May pointed out that you could use steganographic techniques (concealing some data within other data) to hide a fortune in digital cash in the file of a song or a high-resolution image. A banal digital photo could hold a whole armored car full of cash. But the cash was of the same stuff as the photo and had the same fundamental problem of duplication. Dyson had argued for AMIX on two grounds: digital information was free to replicate in general but costly to find in particular, and the most valuable data tends not to be widely available. How would that work for the kind of digital media that we call money?
Salin did not live to see what became of these projects, dying in December 1991 of liver cancer at 41, shortly after AMIX was acquired by the computer-aided design (CAD) company Autodesk. He became the fifty-ninth person to undergo controlled cryonic suspension, having a “neuro” procedure—his head removed and frozen to be recovered by the society he anticipated, with his brain revived or digitally reconstructed and his body cloned or prosthetically replaced. He discussed one of the problems this raised with May: how to move your assets forward through time with you to immortality. If it was challenging to accurately price the Space Shuttle, and difficult to securely transact payments between people on the American Information Exchange, imagine transmitting money into an unknown and unrecognizable future in which you yourself have been “deanimated,” frozen in a cask in Arizona, and recovered in some posthuman format.
May’s notes from 1993 on “timed-release cryptographic protocols,” theoretical methods for encrypting a message so it can only be read after some length of time or a specific event, presented the first use case from a discussion with Salin years before: “Foremost, to send money into the future, while protecting it in the meantime from seizure, taxation, etc.,” a matter of interest “to cryonics folks who want to arrange for their own revival/reanimation at some time in the future.”35 (A decade later, Julian Assange would take up the same question on the cypherpunks list, but for securing the release of secrets.36) It would be a future-proofed bank account and could offer a reward for resurrectionists: the first group to bring the account holder back to life gets a promised prize once the data is decrypted. It would be the ultimate score for the information brokers of the future Salin wanted to create: a pricing system for bringing its own creator back from the dead.
Salin’s eccentric orbit took him and his collaborator, cofounder, and spouse, the nanotechnology advocate Gayle Pergamit, around the speculative edges of a series of near-future industries: from time-sharing computers, to writing economic analysis that fed into the breakup of the Bell Telephone monopoly, to a private space program and a digital information marketplace—but his oddest job title appeared on the employee roster for a business called the Xanadu Operating Company (XOR): “Accelerator.” (Pergamit’s title on the roster was “Hidden Variable.”)37 Xanadu was a sister project to AMIX, an initiative to digitize all human knowledge and weave money into it at the most fundamental level.38 For the Xanadu team, as for Salin, money was the best rocket fuel, the propellant into the future: Xanadu’s Theodor “Ted” Nelson (XOR employee title: “Director”) described himself and the “final implementation squad” he assembled in Pennsylvania in an effort to finish the project as “Devoted capitalists all … I from hatred of committees, blunted creativity and the dilution of thought; they from desire for their own space shuttle.”39 Digital information and digital money, properly implemented, would carry them from their chairs in front of a PDP-11 computer in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, to the stars.
It was through investing in Xanadu that the computer-aided design software company Autodesk came to invest in AMIX. The two companies fit together, and not just by virtue of sharing several people, including Salin. They were both about finding, navigating, and, above all, pricing digital information: “To accept that in our age,” as Autodesk founder John Walker put it in a memo to his executives, “information is a commodity as tangible as wheat, live hogs, Swiss francs, or the S&P500 index.”40 Information was somehow money, or could be, and the network that used it could offer utility “as self-evident as the function of currency futures in the post-Bretton Woods era.”41 In Xanadu and AMIX, Walker saw a way to develop information marketplaces whose operation and pricing could speed the growth of a new kind of research and development suited to digital systems—a kind of accelerator for technological society as a whole.
AMIX’s mechanism involved building a straightforward (if sweepingly ambitious) marketplace for information. Xanadu’s system was far more extreme, a model for all human culture, past and future, in which digital information and money would be inseparable and indistinguishable. It was effectively a reinvention of everything as digital money, forever. From the position of trying to keep a company afloat in the quotidian present, Walker described surreal conversations with the Xanadu team who planned to “design, in its entirety, a system which can store all the information in every form, present and future, for quadrillions of individuals over billions of years.”42 The whole project, he wrote, had “hyper-warped into the techno-hubris zone.”
Hyper- was a good choice of prefix. Nelson had coined the term “hypertext,” first publishing it in 1965 in a paper “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate.” He had been intermittently evangelizing and arguing for a system to realize his vision for decades. This system, named Xanadu, promised to become a global network of terminals providing authoring and access tools to all text that had ever been or would ever be written, plus relations within and between texts, audio, video, “n-dimensional graphics,” things, people, places, and “DNA/RNA.”
Xanadu would be a kind of cosmic ampersand, linking everything to everything else and refusing any form of conclusion, closure, or endpoint for everything except Xanadu itself, whose design would be definitive. “The reason it has taken so long is that all of its ultimate features are part of the design,” Nelson wrote. “Others begin by designing systems to do less, and then add features; we have designed this as a unified structure to handle it all.”43
A system with such cosmic ambition and scale meant that design choices had metaphysical implications. The design reflected the revelation, Nelson argued repeatedly, of “the true structure of the ideas.”44 The true structure was one of property, ownership, and the circulation of digital money. Much has been made of Nelson’s novel ideas about the navigation and display of digital text, and the trainwreck glamor of the unfinished and unfinishable four-decade project that Xanadu became, but at the deepest technical level Xanadu was a payment system—a marketplace infrastructure—on which new textual practices would be built. Nelson described the system as “a technical structure and an ownership convention.”45 Knowledge existed in terms of fixed authorship, ownership, and payment. The future user of Xanadu, one of those quadrillions of individuals over billions of years using the perfect knowledge system, was the “rightful copyright holder, or someone who has permission from the copyright holder and pays for storage.” The basis of the Xanadu network of many Xanadu terminals hooked together would be “a royalty on every byte transmitted.”46
One of the most important developers on the project, Mark Miller (XOR employee title: “Hacker”) led the development of an addressing system to make this possible—the “tumbler” system, based on the properties of transfinite numbers—which could specify the location and owner of any particular byte. “In the literary tradition, it has an owner, and may be quoted and linked-to by other documents—within certain rules intended to be fair,” wrote Nelson (making one wonder to which “literary tradition” he was referring, copyright and authorship being comparatively recent developments).47 Miller, who spelled his middle name $amuel to express his allegiance to money as a force, kept an aphorism on his homepage: “If it’s not allocated by a market, then it’s more expensive than money.”48 He would go on to develop “agorics,” market-like computational systems, and espouse smart contracts; he reappears later in this book among the Extropians.49
A particular structure of property, authorship, and payment was built into the deepest structure of the system; to write, in Xanadu, is to own in relation to other owners—and to pay for time on the server. This “unified structure,” with absolute conditions and “all of the ultimate features” set in advance, would by fiat make all digital “complex clusterings of text (i.e., thought)”50 into scarce and controlled commodities, impossible to duplicate. (Quoting text in Xanadu would not copy it, but “transclude” it from its location in memory and the account of the person who created it—a chain of attribution and royalties.) It would “monetize” thought not just in the sense of making it pay, but making it into money itself. All exchanges of information would also be transactions of funds. To write and read would be to pay and be paid.
How Xanadu would implement the movement of money—the aggregation of all those micropayments, far below a cent, grouped and settled—remained still more vague than many other aspects of the system. The demand was clear, though: digital information needed to become a market in itself, at once priced and the metric of price. The future demanded nothing less of us. Miller returned from a hiatus to work on Xanadu in 1988, he wrote, “because of fear about the dangers of nanotechnology, coupled with incredible excitement about the promises.… By creating better media for the process of societal discourse and societal decision-making, we stand a much better chance of surviving the dangers posed by new technologies.”51 The path to the future lay through the information market and the decisions it drove. Working for them as a consultant, the libertarian economist Robin Hanson created a prediction market internal to Xanadu where employees could bet on future events, including the claim “Xanadu will deliver its product before Premier Deng of China dies.”52 Hanson explained: “They hoped that their product could help China through a post Deng-transition to democracy.” (Hanson also reappears in this book among the Extropians, developing a currency of “idea futures.”)
Xanadu existed in a permanent future tense, from the “final implementation squad” in Pennsylvania in 1979 to the promise from Walker in 1988 that the new team would “bring an initial Xanadu system to the market within 18 months.”53 Receding always into the future, Xanadu would operate for millions of years starting six months from now. AMIX had to build their “own Internet,” and Xanadu, operating from deep within the techno-hubris zone, had to ship a single unified structure capable of scaling to all expressions of all forms of thought forever. Two years after the investment, Autodesk was in the process of selling its 80 percent stake in AMIX and Xanadu and the business of figuring out how to make digital information quantifiably valuable.
Both AMIX and Xanadu were public systems, built around explicit authorship connected to every word, document, and link, and bound to bank accounts and persistent identities. Tim May was well aware of the ways such a system would be used if identity could instead be concealed, encrypted, or obfuscated. Several key Xanadu programmers were on the cypherpunks mailing list that began after that first meeting in 1992, the people Jude Milhon transformed into her visitors from the future. Talking with Salin about AMIX, May pointed out how quickly it would either provide the model for a black market for information or become a black market itself. Someone has a very specific technical question for AMIX, May hypothesized, about microchip design and fabrication—effectively a trade secret. “How long before a guy who works for a chip firm offers to sell his company’s tens of millions of dollars in research for a hundred thousand dollars?”54
That was a way to make digital information valuable, and a step toward the genesis of crypto anarchy. It was a different version of the marketplace that would alter the world, and it too had its roots in a story, May wrote. “My thinking was already heavily influenced by Vinge’s ‘True Names.’ ”55