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

"I think people who are crazy about Bitcoin have an almost religious attitude to it and see it as a kind of revelation. But, of course, the truth is that Bitcoin is part of a much longer evolutionary family tree of electronic cash technologies, which because of my great age, I’ve been involved with for a very long time. What Brunton does very well is to talk about this longer history and context—where did Bitcoin come from? It built on all of these previous developments and came out of a certain context. It talks about the cypherpunk groups and the libertarian ideologies that underpinned these earlier developments. Bitcoin wasn’t something that dropped down from heaven. It’s something that evolved. I find that fascinating and so will readers who are more interested in what it does than how it works. I really like his writing style. It’s a very nicely written book and I enjoyed reading it very much. He’s talking about things like David Chaum’s DigiCash in the 1990s, Adam Back and Hashcash, Bit Gold and these kinds of things. He talks about how different people were building and developing different parts of it. It’s a bit like the steam engine story. Somebody had a steam engine, then someone else invented a condenser and then somebody else invented a governor and, all of a sudden, you had steam engines that could do a hundred miles an hour. It’s that sort of story he’s telling. He talks about this idea of the Wild West. People in that community talk about this world of Bitcoin being the Wild West, but they have a very romanticized and essentially fictional image of what the Wild West was. After all, if the Wild West was all that they say it was, we would still be in it. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t very good. That’s why we don’t have it anymore. Uncharitable people might see it as a sort of teenage, angry-white-male pseudo-libertarianism. It’s not real political libertarianism. It’s more a mom-won’t-let-me-buy-a-PlayStation sort of libertarianism. Anyway, it’s a very good book about the fact that this is an evolutionary tree, which by implication, will continue to evolve. I think you’d be hard-pressed to persuade me that Bitcoin has been mainstreamed. You might be able to persuade me that publicity about Bitcoin has been mainstreamed. But the number of people that hold Bitcoin is still small. I think most Bitcoins are still held by ‘whales’, as they call them. It’s a very thin and opaque market that’s subject to transparent manipulation. And most holdings are utterly speculative. Nobody actually uses Bitcoin for anything. That’s why Brunton’s view of it as part of a growing and evolving phenomenon, which will continue to evolve, is appealing to me. No, I don’t think it does. It’s probably like the Newcomen steam engine that was used for pumping water out of Cornish mines. It was a first, it was hopelessly inefficient, but it was the only way of doing some particular thing, so the inefficiency was tolerated. But you didn’t put a Newcomen steam engine on wheels to create the Flying Scotsman, you carried on evolving the technology and I think that’s what will happen."