1. Desan, Making Money, 331.
1. Akin, Technocracy, 29; the book is an invaluable resource for the reader interested in this remarkable moment of American history. See also Segal, Technological Utopianism, chap. 6.
2. The cofounders of the party included Marion King Hubbert, a geologist who is better known for the “Hubbert peak” theory of petroleum production, which achieved public notoriety several decades later as “peak oil.”
3. As cited in Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 435.
4. Ahamed, Lords of Finance, chap. 21, includes an extremely entertaining overview of these and other results of the cash crunch in the United States; this paragraph is largely extracted from his account.
5. On this project, see Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, chap. 7, and Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media, chap. 8.
6. Technocracy Inc., “Total Conscription!”
7. Fezer, “The Energy Certificate.”
8. Tresch, Romantic Machine, xvii.
9. Ohanian and Royoux, Cosmograms, 68.
10. For an excellent brief introduction to these projects—called “demurrage currencies”—in the context of political-utopian projects, see North, Money and Liberation, 62–66. The canonical stamp scrip project was the “Wörgl experiment,” building on the work of the anarchist economist Silvio Gesell. For an excellent, thorough overview of Gesell’s work, see Onken, “The Political Economy of Silvio Gesell.” The quote is from Gesell, The Natural Economic Order, 121.
11. For a much deeper study of communities and time in the work of making new forms of money, see Maurer, Mutual Life, Limited.
12. Ibid., 89.
13. There is rich scholarship in this area, but for purposes of this chapter I point the reader to Graeber, Debt, and to Hudson, “How Interest Rates Were Set, 2500 BC–1000 AD.”
14. This idea—the promise that other promises will turn out to be worthless—comes from the work of the theorist of finance and globalization Arjun Appadurai: Banking on Words. For the Yale water bond, see https://
15. For an excellent analysis of the “anxiety, fear, and suspicion at work in the technologies of rational prediction in finance,” see Zaloom, “How to Read the Future.”
16. The term “reserve technology” is from the historian of technology David Edgerton. See Edgerton, Shock of the Old, chap. 1. See also Lisa Servon’s work on consumer banking and the danger of monthly fees and overdraft charges—and how the clarity offered by payday loan and check-cashing institutions can be preferable (Servon, The Unbanking of America).
17. For a deeper analysis of this, see William Deringer’s study of the development of different models of discounting in the seventeenth century: “As it turns out, compound-interest discounting [the model that won] is probably not the method that best reflects how people instinctually feel about the future, even today” (Deringer, “Pricing the Future,” 521).
18. Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution, 6.
19. Ibid., 20.
20. Zelizer, Economic Lives, 154.
21. This only alludes to a larger question than this study can address: the gendering of different forms of money and payment systems. Along with Zelizer’s work, see Waring, If Women Counted, Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism, and Swartz, “Gendered Transactions.”
22. Desan, Making Money, 6.
23. Ibid.
24. Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” 451.
25. Keynes, “The General Theory of Employment,” 216.
26. Tresch, “Cosmogram,” 74.
27. Dwiggins, Towards a Reform, 20.
28. Ibid., 19.
29. Belasco, Meals to Come, 181, 182.
30. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come, 266.
31. Ibid., 285.
32. Morrisson, Modern Alchemy, 176—the book provides the definitive account of this peculiar and fascinating genre.
1. Benjamin, “One-Way Street,”481.
2. Spang, Stuff and Money, 46.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. Kafka, The Demon of Writing, 77.
5. Spang, Stuff and Money, 175.
6. McPhee, Oranges, 97.
7. As quoted in Beniger, Control Revolution, 163.
8. This argument builds on the research and theories of Beniger, Control Revolution, chap. 4.
9. Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, ix.
10. For more on the public health history of the death certificate, see Schulz, “Final Forms.”
11. Robertson, “The Aesthetics of Authenticity.”
12. Poovey, Genres, 3.
13. Dwiggins, Towards a Reform, 27.
14. Swartz, Social Transactions.
15. Gilbert, “Forging a National Currency,” 42.
16. Emerich Juettner, better known as Edward Mueller, was a senior citizen in New York City who had given up his job as an apartment superintendent in favor of becoming a junkman after his wife passed away in the 1930s. Scraping along the margins of survival, he turned to counterfeiting in a kind of humble desperation that made him almost impossible to catch: he stuck to one-dollar bills, at which no one looks closely—even when they’re as clumsy as his were, printed on stationery store bond paper and awkwardly retouched, even misspelling “Washington.” He passed only one or two a day, at most, when his own money ran short. Because he didn’t want to harm businesses by paying them with notes they couldn’t deposit, he never passed a counterfeit at the same place twice, criss-crossing Manhattan to buy groceries and dog food. Year after year, the Secret Service busted far more sophisticated and dangerous counterfeiting operations, but “Old 880” eluded their intensive search for more than a decade. See McKelway, “Mister Eight-Eighty.”
17. See the work of Viviana Zelizer on the issue of earmarking and variably discounting money—especially the landmark article “The Social Meaning of Money.” See also research in behavioral economics, particularly the work of Richard Thaler on mental accounting, beginning with “Mental Accounting and Consumer Choice.”
18. Gibson, Zero History, 345–46.
19. Murdoch, “Software Detection of Currency”; Murdoch and Laurie, “The Convergence of Anti-Counterfeiting”; Kuhn, “The EURion Constellation”; Nieves, Ruiz-Agundez, and Bringas, “Recognizing Banknote Patterns.”
1. This account is drawn from Fitzsimons, Nancy Wake (which, though a popular book, was based on interviews with Wake herself and has been verified by secondary scholarship); and Elliott, The Shooting Star.
2. Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide, 44.
3. Ibid., 590.
4. Wallace and Melton, Spycraft, 436.
5. For the curious reader, I’m using the substitution table and the first lines of the one-time pad that Marks himself used in presenting the LOP system to Cmdr. Dudley-Smith. Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide, 246.
6. Kahn, The Codebreakers, provides a rich overview of decades of different applications of one-time pads, including photographs of concealment tools for the materials. An excellent summary of such a system in diplomatic use is Smith, “Book Ciphers.”
7. Shannon, “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems.”
8. Levy, Crypto; Singh, The Code Book; Plutte, “Whitfield Diffie Interview.”
9. Merkle, “Secure Communications over Insecure Channels.”
10. Singh, The Code Book, 283.
11. Levy, Crypto, 270.
12. Diffie and Hellman, “New Directions,” 652.
13. Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman, “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures”; Blanchette, Burdens of Proof.
14. This number is RSA-240, an RSA Factoring Challenge semiprime, created to encourage research into the kinds of numbers used in RSA cryptographic keys. The challenge has been suspended—the field’s understanding of the strength of different cryptographic schemes has moved on—but the answer to this challenge number, along with many other RSA factoring challenges, has never been found.
15. Blanchette, Burdens of Proof, 81.
16. Diffie and Hellman, “New Directions,” 649.
17. Ibid.
18. Blanchette, Burdens of Proof, 63.
19. This section is based on Meier and Zabell, “Benjamin Peirce and the Howland Will” and the anonymous “The Howland Will Case.”
20. Furthermore, 110 checks of President John Quincy Adams were examined, and some transferred to transparent paper so they could be superimposed on one another—what better reference point than a president?
21. “The Howland Will Case,” 577.
22. Twenty years later Charles Peirce’s student and friend, the art historian Allan Marquand, built a mechanical device for automatically solving a set of problems in formal logic (housing it in a cedar case made from a post at Princeton’s oldest homestead), and Peirce made a recommendation: “I think electricity would be the best thing to rely on.” As Marquand diagramed the first electric circuits for logical operations, Peirce published a paper on the prospects for such work. “Precisely how much of the business of thinking a machine could possibly be made to perform, and what part of it must be left for the living mind, is a question not without conceivable practical importance; the study of it can at any rate not fail to throw needed light on the nature of the reasoning process” (Peirce, “Logical Machines,” 165).
23. Peirce, “Of Reasoning in General,” 13.
24. Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy, 179.
25. For a rewarding philosophical analysis of what “signatures” are in fact doing in cryptography—with particular reference to the blockchain—see DuPont, “Blockchain Identities.”
1. Greenberger, “The Computers of Tomorrow.”
2. McCarthy, “The Home Information Terminal.”
3. Stearns, Electronic Value Exchange, 44. This book is a splendid history of Visa and Hock, including much fascinating material unavailable elsewhere, and deserves to be much more widely read.
4. Ibid., 195.
5. Armer, “Computer Technology and Surveillance,” 10.
6. Ibid., 11.
7. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 25.
8. See Eubanks, Automating Inequality, particularly chap. 2.
9. Deleuze, “Postscript,” 5.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 6.
12. Two vital books for further fleshing out this conversation are Bratton, The Stack, and Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud.
13. Gleick, “The End of Cash.”
14. Chaum, “Blind Signatures,” 199.
15. US Congress, “Federal Government Information Technology.”
16. Chaum, as quoted in Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 65. Patents cited include “Electronic lock that can learn to recognize any ordinary key” (6318137) and “Physical and digital secret ballot systems” (20010034640).
17. Biagioli, “From Ciphers to Confidentiality.”
18. Chaum, “Prepaid Smart Card Techniques.”
19. Chaum, “Security without Identification.”
20. Finney, “Protecting Privacy with Electronic Cash,” 12.
21. Chaum, “Achieving Electronic Privacy.”
22. Gleick, “The End of Cash.”
23. See Levy, Crypto, 293; Röckelein and Maier, “A Common Currency System”; Gleick, “The End of Cash.”
24. Blanchette, Burdens of Proof, 60.
25. This opening up of a design space can be read alongside the reinterpretation of computing in the service of liberation described in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.
26. For the general context of the political battle with central banking and its relation to cryptocurrency, see Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin. One interesting area for further research—unfortunately outside the scope of this book—is the “digital bearer certificate” project developed by Robert Hettinga. Hettinga was a regular cypherpunk correspondent, and his proposals and research suggest an alternative approach that post-Chaum digital money could have taken.
27. Finney, “Why remailers.…”
28. Pitta, “Requiem.”
29. Narayanan, “What Happened to the Crypto Dream?,” 3.
1. These four paragraphs, including all quotes, are based on her account (Milhon, “Secretions”).
2. Jude and Community Memory have been extensively discussed: see Levy, Hackers, particularly chap. 8; Felsenstein, “Community Memory”; Doub, “Community Memory”; and Brand, “Spacewar!”
3. Levy, Hackers.
4. Liška, “St. Jude’s Legacy.”
5. All quotes in this paragraph are from Milhon, “Secretions.”
6. Meieran, Engel, and May, “Measurement of Alpha Particle Radioactivity,” 20–21.
7. For an outstanding journalistic account of the legacies of crypto anarchy and the birth of WikiLeaks—including many of the same people in this book but concerned with whistle-blowing and disclosure rather than money, see Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets.
8. Hughes, “Nuts & Acorns.”
9. May, “Libertaria in Cyberspace.”
10. May, “The Cyphernomicon,” 17.3.1.
11. May, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”
12. Ibid.
13. May, “The Cyphernomicon,” 17.3.1.
14. Ibid.
15. Benkler, Wealth of Networks—particularly chap. 3.
16. May, “The Cyphernomicon,” 17.3.1.
17. Hughes, “Nuts & Acorns.”
18. May, “The Cyphernomicon,” 16.3.4.
19. Stadd, “NASA Headquarters Oral History Project.”
20. As quoted in Peterson, “Shuttle Pricing,” 12.
21. As quoted in Dyson, “Making Markets,” 2.
22. Orr, “Join the Information Economy.”
23. Ott, “For Your Information.”
24. Dyson, “Information, Bid and Asked,” 92.
25. Dyson, “Making Markets,” 5.
26. For context on Brand and Spacewar!, see Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, particularly chap. 4.
27. Brand, “Spacewar!”
28. Which, as a practical matter, we almost always do. For an explanation of this and, more profoundly, the challenge of transmission, storage, and replication over noisy channels, see Sterne, MP3.
29. For a striking alternative to this argument, see DuPont, “Blockchain Identities.”
30. There’s a lot to say about this that exceeds the mission of this book, but some good places to start include Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms, and his distinction between forensic and formal materiality; Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy, particularly chap. 6; and Boon, In Praise of Copying, also particularly chap. 6.
31. For more information and considerable insight into Zuse’s data storage filmstrips as the intersection of media and computing, see Manovich, The Language of New Media, particularly chap. 1.
32. There is an immense literature on this topic; for this book’s questions, particularly around duplication and ownership, I would recommend Johns, Piracy, as a reference point.
33. Dyson, “Making Markets,” 5.
34. Kevin Kelly, a contemporary of Dyson’s who edited Wired magazine during the stretch when it profiled the cypherpunks and published Wolf’s epic account of the Xanadu fiasco—he also wrote at length about digital cash in Out of Control—has provided a thoughtful answer to this question, based in the mistakes of past predictions, in several sections of his 2016 book The Inevitable.
35. May, “Timed-Release Crypto.”
36. As did Rivest, Shamir, and Wagner, along with developing public key cryptography and micropayment systems: see their “Time-Lock Puzzles.”
37. The acronymic name is also a computer science in-joke: an XOR—“exclusive or”—is a logical operation that returns a result of 1 only when the inputs differ: 1 XOR 1 gives 0, and 0 XOR 1 gives 1. On such a simple basis you can build very complex things.
38. Xanadu’s significance as a concept is hard to overstate, and there is much prior scholarship on the project. For a start, see Barnet, Memory Machines; Harpold, Ex-foliations, chap. 2; and Rayward, “Visions of Xanadu.”
39. Nelson, Literary Machines, 1/35.
40. Walker, The Autodesk File, 500.
41. Ibid., 499.
42. Ibid., 843.
43. Nelson, Literary Machines, 0/5.
44. Ibid., 1/25.
45. Ibid., 2/29.
46. Ibid., 2/43.
47. Ibid., 4/29.
48. See under “The Rule of Scarcity” on http://
49. Miller also claims to have independently invented the hierarchical navigation interface through nested directories that is now commonplace—most familiar from iTunes and the Mac OS X “column view”—as “Miller Columns” in 1980.
50. Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, 41.
51. Miller, Tribble, Pandya, and Stiegler, “The Open Society and Its Media,” 18.
52. http://
53. Walker, The Autodesk File, 424.
54. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 59.
55. May, “Re: Anguilla—A DataHaven?”
1. May, “Re: Wired & Batch File.”
2. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 6, 73.
3. These terms from: May, “Re: HACKERS: Crypto Session Being Planned.”
4. Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” 12.
5. Vinge, True Names, 245.
6. Dai, “Cypherpunks and Guns.”
7. Vinge, True Names, 285.
8. May, “Re: Blacknet Worries.”
9. For the record: the cypherpunk mailing list, the alt.extropian newsgroup, and the newsgroup alt.fan.david-sternlight—an inside joke, Sternlight being famously dubious, touchy, and trollish in his dislike for some applications of cryptography.
10. This phenomenon (including my examples) is described in Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers, chap. 2.
11. For those playing along at home: “Don’t let JS see you look at advertisement.”
12. May, “Introduction to BlackNet,” 242. If you are curious to see May’s original, anonymous post and the reaction to it, it was forwarded to the cypherpunk mailing list from one of the recipients (Timothy Newsham) on August 18, 1993, under the subject line “no subject (file transmission).” It can be found in the archive at https://
13. This is quoted from his excellent history of BlackNet’s launch and its aftermath, including issues we can’t attend to here, like the “assassination market”: Rid, Rise of the Machines, 278.
14. More, Utopia, 249.
15. May, “Introduction to BlackNet,” 241.
16. An excellent discussion of the resemblance and connections is Sterling, “The Blast Shack”; see also Rid, Rise of the Machines.
17. Brunton, “Keyspace.”
18. Hughes, “No Subject”; May, “A Minor Experimental Result.”
19. Swartz, “Blockchain Dreams,” 85.
20. Turner, “Prototype,” 256.
21. Ibid., 259.
22. Lewis, “On Line with William Gibson.”
23. Barlow, “Crime and Puzzlement.”
24. Turner, “Can We Write a Cultural History of the Internet?,” 40.
25. May, “The Cyphernomicon,” 8.4.22 and 4.8.2.
26. May, “Introduction to BlackNet,” 241.
27. Barlow, “A Cyberspace Independence Declaration.”
28. The term “settler frontier” is from Richards, The Unending Frontier, 6: frontiers that “required the active political, military, and fiscal engagement and support of an aggrandizing state.”
29. May, “The Cyphernomicon,” 16.21.5.
30. Barlow, “A Cyberspace Independence Declaration.”
31. May, “Untraceable Digital Cash.”
32. Stallman, “What Is Free Software?”
33. Martinson, “Another Pax-Type Remailer.”
34. Ibid.
1. Mitchell, “The Contributions of Grace Murray Hopper,” 68.
2. Ibid., 39.
3. For present, practical purposes, that is, setting aside things like quantum entanglement for now.
4. Williams, “Improbable Warriors,” 112.
5. Mitchell, “The Contributions of Grace Murray Hopper,” 63.
6. A related idea—which Back was not aware of during the development of hashcash—was described in 1992 by Dwork and Naor, “Pricing via Processing.” Rivest also proposed antispam applications of the 2004 Peppercoin system he developed with Silvio Micali. See Rivest, “Peppercoin Micropayments.”
7. Knott, “Hashing Functions,” 275.
8. Morris, “Scatter Storage Techniques.”
9. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms, 177.
10. Ibid., 85.
11. Finney, “RPOW Theory.”
12. For the sake of accuracy, it bears mentioning that Google engineers and the CWI Amsterdam were in fact able to engineer a collision for SHA-1 in February of 2017: to produce identical hashes for different data, endangering various SHA-1–based systems for certification and signing—but the work described here precedes that demonstration. See https://
13. “Post-Office Stamps as Currency.”
14. Szabo, “Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes.”
15. Szabo, “Bit Gold.” This is quoted from his more formal elaboration of the idea in 2005. In 1999 (Szabo, “Intrapolynomial Cryptography”), he referred to “hashcash, MicroMint, bit gold, etc.” in the context of benchmark functions; in 1998 (Szabo, “Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority”), he described an aspect of the bit gold system in depth.
16. May, “The Cyphernomicon,” 6.3.3.
17. May, “The Cyphernomicon,” 6.8.3.
18. May, “Re: Guns: H&K.”
19. Dai, “Cypherpunks and Guns.”
20. Dai, “PipeNet 1.1 and B-Money.”
21. Finney, “Re: Currency Based on Energy.”
22. Ibid.
23. It would not be a simple thing to implement—as Bitcoin subsequently demonstrated—and Dai proposed some alternatives: he discussed ways to rely on a set of centralized servers, since keeping synchrony between all those individual ledgers was a considerable challenge, and ways for participants to bid on the difficulty of minting new money to keep the price, in computational work, theoretically fair.
24. Nakamoto, “Citation of Your B-Money Page.”
25. Nakamoto, “Re: Citation of Your B-Money Page.”
26. Finney, “Re: Currency Based on Energy.”
1. More, “Editorial.”
2. More, “Denationalisation of Money,” 19.
3. Ibid., 20.
4. “Introduction,” 3.
5. A superb summary of the phenomenon of air-mindedness, analyzed in parallel with computing, is available in Edgerton, The Shock of the Old.
6. More, “The Extropian Principles,” 17.
7. Arne Naess, who sat with the Circle—and would go on to develop the theory of deep ecology—handed out a questionnaire on the streets of Vienna with only one question: “How do you decide what is true?”
8. Mises, Human Action, 32.
9. The summary here draws primarily on Hayek, The Denationalization of Money and The Market and Other Orders; Mises, Notes and Recollections (particularly chaps. 1 and 4, and part 4) and The Theory of Money and Credit; O’Driscoll and Rizzo, Austrian Economics Re-examined; and Jones, Masters of the Universe.
10. When he first used this term, Popper referred to “utopian social engineering”; by the time he wrote The Open Society, he summarized it as “utopian engineering” (Popper, Open Society, 148).
11. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. 2, 108–9.
12. It’s beyond the scope of this book, but this project has interesting relationships with the set of ideas and political commitments subsequently dubbed “accelerationism.” The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in the UK, one of the agenda setters of accelerationist ideas, were the pessimistic contemporary cousins of the Extropians; they played out a dystopian end game from the same premises, likewise encouraging bubble economies and the invention of new currencies—though in a rhetorical, techno-Gothic spirit that produced no working prototypes.
13. Appadurai, “The Spirit of Calculation,” 9, and the larger argument in the context of his Banking on Words. See also Zaloom, Out of the Pits.
14. Marx, Grundrisse, 410.
15. “Spontaneous Orders,” 7.
16. Yow, “Mindsurfing.”
17. Cypher, “Magic Money Digicash System.”
18. Finney, “Protecting Privacy with Electronic Cash.”
19. Chaum, “Security without Identification,” 1030.
20. Most notably, the autodidact artificial intelligence philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who seeks a kind of predictive conversation with the superintelligence-to-be, and the neoreactionary, racist, and “neocameralist” (imagine a monarchist Technocracy Inc.) software developer Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin … but that’s another book. Yarvin is currently leading development on Urbit, a clean-slate redesign of cloud computing: “If Bitcoin is digital money,” said Yarvin, “Urbit is digital land.”
21. Hanson, “Idea Futures,” 9.
22. Potvin, “A Solicitation.” The date is based on his posting to the Extropian list (Potvin, “Extropians’ Net Worths”).
23. SEC v. SG Ltd. (2001). No. CIV. A. 00-11141-JLT.
24. Brekke, “Money for Nothing.”
25. May, “Untraceable Digital Cash.”
26. Spang, Stuff and Money, 272.
27. Bell, “Extropia.”
28. Machado, “Five Things.”
29. Bishop, “my EXTRO 3 perspective”; Szabo, “Future Forecasts,” “Intrapolynomial Cryptography,” and “Bit Gold.”
1. Finney, “Exercise and Longevity.”
2. This text is excerpted from several different drafts in “The Cryonics Bracelet Contest.”
3. Romain, “Extreme Life Extension,” 4.
4. de Wolf, “Deconstructing Future Shock,” 5.
5. Platt, “Hamburger Helpers,” 14.
6. “Excitations/Advances,” 6–7.
7. Simberg, “The Frozen Frontier.”
8. Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows, chapter 16.
9. Szilard, “Memoirs,” 4.
10. Ettinger, “The Penultimate Trump.”
11. It is not a story of cold sleep, but Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward deserves honorable mention here: Julian West, the main character, is hypnotically preserved to reach a new economic future—including “credit cards,” a term Bellamy coined. “This card is issued for a certain number of dollars,” the future’s inhabitant says of the “piece of pasteboard” he hands West. “We have kept the old word, but not the substance. The term, as we use it, answers to no real thing, but merely serves as an algebraical symbol for comparing the values of products with one another.”
12. Szilard, “The Mark Gable Foundation,” 2.
13. This section is based closely on Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments and A Martian Stranded on Earth.
14. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 32.
15. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. 3, 176.
16. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. 1, 38.
17. Ibid., 42.
18. Robin, “Wealth and the Intellectuals.” The future-oriented oligarch Hayek anticipates shares a type with the ideal corporate leader, as described by Schumpeter: with a “critical receptivity to new facts,” always awake to the next thing, possessed of “extraordinary physical and nervous energy” (Schumpeter, “The Rise and Fall of Families,” 123).
19. Drinan, “Review: Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Volume 3),” 621.
20. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 40.
21. Where to begin rebutting Hayek’s claim here? Virtually none of the history of technology corresponds to this account; the excellent place to start is the analysis of innovation, invention, distribution, and production given by Edgerton, The Shock of the Old.
1. Brunnermeier, “Deciphering the Liquidity and Credit Crunch.”
2. Nakamoto, “Bitcoin P2P e-Cash Paper.”
3. To choose three objections: “We very, very much need such a system,” wrote cryptographer and cypherpunk James Donald in reply to Nakamoto (Donald, “Bitcoin P2P e-Cash Paper”). “But the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.” “I think the real issue with this system is the market for bitcoins,” another list regular wrote (Dillinger, “Bitcoin P2P e-Cash Paper”). “Computing proofs-of-work have no intrinsic value.” Noting a potential concern in the proof-of-work system itself, John Levine—a longtime figure in the world of Internet and email security and trust—pointed out: “This is the same reason that hashcash can’t work on today’s Internet—the good guys have vastly less computational firepower than the bad guys. I also have my doubts about other issues, but this one is the killer” (Levine, “Bitcoin P2P e-Cash Paper”).
4. This initial reception and discussion has been described in journalistic accounts, most notably Popper, Digital Gold, conclusion of chap. 2.
5. The reclusive mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, whose work on the ABC Conjecture has to do with a puzzle about the frequency of prime factors and the additive and multiplicative properties of numbers. There is no particular reason to assume Mochizuki is Nakamoto.
6. Nakamoto, “Re: Citation of Your B-Money Page.”
7. Finney, “Bitcoin P2P e-Cash Paper.”
8. Diffie and Hellman, “New Directions in Cryptography,” 654.
9. Nakamoto, “Bitcoin P2P e-Cash Paper.”
10. Greenfield, Radical Technologies, chap. 5, provides a superb and lucid explanation for how Bitcoin works for the layperson, including this description of just how little the “consensus” model may reflect common use of the word: “Dissent may persist for a while, but it will expire gradually, as one candidate sequence crosses the threshold past which the likelihood that it can be challenged dwindles toward zero. All mining nodes eventually converge on this single longest chain, which becomes canonical once all its onetime competitors have fallen by the wayside.”
11. Nakamoto, “Bitcoin v0.1 Released.”
12. For an analysis of Bitcoin’s place in the larger world of ledger-based money, see Maurer, “Money as Token and Money as Record.”
13. Nelson, Literary Machines, 2/29.
14. A good example of the former is the DarkWallet project (https://
15. Hern, “Missing: Hard Drive Containing Bitcoins.”
16. This address currently holds 8,000 BTC, all produced in a two-month period in 2009, corresponding to Howells’s remembered dates. The address has never had an outgoing transaction and has been completely inactive since April 26, 2009—except for an odd scattering of incoming transactions in extremely small amounts beginning in 2014. I believe these are a side effect of the address being used as a sample address in a few pieces of Bitcoin software at that time and subsequently.
17. Hillis, “The Connection Machine.”
18. For the conjoined history of computing and air conditioning, see Brunton, “Heat Exchanges.”
19. Kolodzey, “CRAY-1 Computer Technology.”
20. Cray, “U.S. Patent No. 4,590,538.”
21. Shirriff, “Mining Bitcoin with Pencil and Paper.”
22. All of this is just solving hashing problems, not trying to do something like signing a Bitcoin transaction, which involves multiplying a lot of very large integers.
23. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 129.
24. Nakamoto, “Bitcoin,” 4.
25. Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz, “When Perhaps the Real Problem Is Money Itself!,” 2.
26. The site for the P2P Foundation requires a birthdate, which it then reflects in the profile’s posted age: http://
27. Metzger, “ADMIN: No Money Politics, Please.”
1. von NotHaus and Presley, “To Know Value.”
2. Ibid., 12, 14, 17.
3. “New Liberty Dollar.”
4. This appears in the text on the warehouse receipts and can be seen reproduced on a specimen copy. For instance, see Exhibit C, as reproduced in Shelter Systems, “Motion for Return,” 33.
5. As entered into evidence in Shelter Systems, “Motion for Return” (from the affidavit), 11.
6. Keynes, “The General Theory of Employment,” 213.
7. von NotHaus, “The Nazi-ization of America,” 492.
8. Silk Road trial: Government Exhibit 270, 14 Cr. 68 (KBF).
9. For an outstanding survey of the DGC space, see Mullan, A History of Digital Currency. The notes on e-gold are from chap. 2 and the primary sources cited there.
10. Smith, The Rationale of Central Banking, 169–70.
11. Greenberg, “Collected Quotations of the Dread Pirate Roberts.”
12. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, 155.
13. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 384.
14. Ibid., 253, 258.
15. Stiefel, The Story of Operation Atlantis.
16. Craib, “Escape Geographies and Libertarian Enclosures.”
17. The fate and operating details of Operation Atlantis are from the research and recollections of Strauss, How to Start Your Own Country, and Halliday, “Operation Atlantis.”
18. My brief summary of Minerva and the Phoenix Foundation is drawn from Craib, “Escape Geographies,” along with McDougall (“Micronations in the Caribbean”), Lindstrom (“Cult and Culture”), and Strauss (How to Start Your Own Country). See Craib’s in-progress book for a deeper analysis; the working title is Libertarian Noir: Exit, Enclosure, and the Age of Right Flight. An excellent, concise summary of the Minerva situation in the context of taxation and sovereignty is available in chap. 3 of van Fossen, Tax Havens.
19. Lindstrom, “Cult and Culture” 117.
20. “1997 MIT $1K Warm-Up Business Idea Competition,” available (still!) at http://
21. Lackey, “Starting an e-Cash Bank.”
22. The article was Garfinkel, “Welcome to Sealand.” Along with other cited materials from this section, I encourage reading the very entertaining account of Sealand and the cypherpunks in Rid, Rise of the Machines, chap. 7.
23. For a superb overview of the legal situation itself and the extensive and profoundly strange related criminal activities, see Grimmelmann, “Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law.”
24. Johns, Death of a Pirate, particularly chap. 8.
25. As quoted in Rid, Rise of the Machines, 281.
26. Lackey’s account of what happened is based on his slide deck for DEF CON following his departure from Sealand (Lackey, “HavenCo: What Really Happened”).
1. For a detailed argument about the records and histories embedded in money, including coins, see Maurer, “Money as Token.”
2. Pettersson, The Spillings Hoard. Famously, a single Khazar coin in that particular hoard—the “Moses coin”—provided a material trace of the conversion of the Khazar dynasty to Judaism, a significant and much debated moment in a complex history. For an overview of how coinage—hoarded and minted—can help us understand the Khazar, see Kovalev, “What Does Historical Numismatics Suggest.”
3. MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, chap. 95.
4. See Desan, “Coin Reconsidered” (particularly 403–9) for a fascinating account of debasement and “competitive debasement”; two insightful accounts of the practice and meaning of cutting, clipping, or destroying coins are Caffentzis, Clipped Coins, and von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune, chap. 3.
5. There is a wonderful and thorough account of the history of the thaler in Weatherford, The History of Money, chap. 7.
6. Addison, Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals and “Autobiography of a Shilling.” See also the fascinating explication of Addison and coinage in Spicer, The Mind is a Collection, particularly exhibit 13.
7. Spang, Stuff and Money, 272.
8. Stadter, “Alexander Hamilton’s Notes on Plutarch.”
9. Franklin, “A Modest Enquiry.”
10. Trettien, “Leaves.”
11. Another interesting variant of this idea was the Weimar German Rentenmark. For an excellent summary of this project and its context, see Taylor, The Downfall of Money, 326–335.
12. For a general overview of this extraordinary conversation, see Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods; for more on Keynes’s plan, see Keynes, “International Clearing Union.” Later, in a strange turn of events, White would be revealed as a kind of financial spy, working covertly for the Soviet Union to aid their postwar economic success, apparently under the conviction that the stability of the new global order relied on the prosperity of both superpowers rather than the triumph of one or the other; among other things, he arranged the Soviet receipt of duplicate plates for printing Allied marks, the legal tender of the postwar German occupation. See Craig, Treasonable Doubt.
13. Lovell, Of Spies and Stratagems, 29.
14. As quoted in Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 20.
15. Mises, Human Action, 173.
16. The topic of the assault rifle is covered by del Castillo, “Dark Wallet,” and Wilson, Come and Take It. The site for the T-shirt company, 7bucktees, has lapsed but can be found in the Internet archive: https://
17. Ver is memorably chronicled in Abrahamian, The Cosmopolites, particularly chap. 5.
18. The site (passportsforbitcoin. com) has been taken offline but remains available through the Internet archive. It has been the subject of controversy, as you would imagine; for an account of the project’s early days, see Clenfield and Alpeyev, “ ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Calls Rich to Tax-Free Tropical Paradise.”
19. Milhon, “Secretions.”
20. Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian.”
21. Dowd, “Peter Thiel.”
22. See Nock, “Isaiah’s Job”; for the effect of these ideas on American conservativism and particularly William F. Buckley, Jr., see Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr., 44–46.
23. For a beautiful evocation of blockchain-based communal property—as well as a few blockchain and cryptocurrency nightmare outcomes—see Greenfield, Radical Technologies, chap. 10.
24. Dodd, “The Social Life of Bitcoin,” 21.
1. Manley, “The Erg Man.”
2. For a detailed overview of these changes, including the wild ride through 2013–2014, see Wolfson, “Bitcoin: The Early Market.”
3. Greenberg, “Nakamoto’s Neighbor.”
4. More, “Hal Finney Being Cryopreserved Now.”