Transact but difficult or impossible to forge and duplicate. It must be easy to verify, to prove that it is what it claims to be under all kinds of conditions and constraints for all kinds of people. It must be able to carry the information about what it is and what its worth without generating any information about how its used or by whom. It has to do this on platforms, networks and machines that generate effectively perfect copies and transaction logs and records in their very functioning. In other words, figuring out the how of how to mix things like cash digital is a very tall order indeed. Which raises the question of why you would need to build such a thing. Answering that question will take us from fighting surveillance to building parallel covert societies to libertarian series of economics and money to the pursuit of human immortality. All of these agendas, all of these wise fed into the creation of bitcoin and the crypto currency and block chain landscape today. This isnt just a story of building a new payment platform or transactional instrument but deliberated attempts to engineer future society through the mechanism of money. A technological project but also utopian one. I like to call these speculative currency projects. Both in the sense of financial speculation but also the term speculative fiction. The currencies were platforms not just to bet on future outcomes but to aid in their imaginings. As i introduced them they will be accompanied by prototypes, aesthetics, stories and practices seeking to inspire fear or hope. To avert future conditions or revoke them to appear. These are currencies that function not just in relation to the future as all money does but as artifacts from it. One of the things i came to enjoy working most on, learning about as i was working on this book was how people who work in the currency world talk about currency. One of the many terms of art they developed is the term the passing current. Which is a way of talking about how something actually functions as money. The passing current is something you accept because you believe someone else will take it from you in the future. So you take it, it passes to you it passes to someone else. Which is to say that the passing current which is what gives currency its honey temporality name also has to do with anticipation. Part of what this book ends up being about is not necessarily currency but instead about how people use the idea of currency to imagine a future where something will be accepted, will be valued, will be in widespread use. In other words, holding a transacting cash is about both belief in the future acceptance of a note but also the veracity of the note itself in your hand. A paper banknote faces a very particular challenge it must be able to prove itself under an extremely demanding range of conditions and to do so to the untrained user. Every time that you go to get a movie ticket and you see the sign up that they have like we no longer accept 50 bills or when you receive these bills use this pen in the following way. Those are all moments of the necessary training of figuring out how to actually verify what currency is. How to make paper banknotes prove themselves. A paper banknote must be able to authenticate itself to you personally in the moment as you handle it and to the whole of society generally. So that you can pass it in turn and convince everyone to the transaction chain that its nearly forged nor counterfeit. Lets take a 20 bill specifically. Beautiful objects of Government Technology in everyday life. Its a project of the authenticating authority. They are amazing by the way. I dont think ill be able to do this but i long to write a book thats just about making secure paperwork. Its an amazing art form and very underappreciated. This document this bill has to function without recourse to any of these authorities. Working lifespan about five or seven years and will be transacted thousands of times in its lifespan under all its conditions and all kinds of circumstances passing in and out of banks before ultimately being withdrawn from the collision and destroyed. There is a marvelous history to be written by someone about relationship between the secret service and production of prop money for movies. Movies need huge volumes of cash. You have to have something to show when you open a suitcase in the secret service carefully supervises how that cash can be produced. It can look believable on camera while not being passable except one secret Service Agent said if its green and has 20 on it someones going to accept it. These bills have to be able to function as the authenticating systems in a context where if its green and has 20 on it, someone is eventually going to take it. I still have to somehow police themselves to the extent that doesnt ruin the currencys ability to function. What this means, each bills realness and uniqueness the singularity the fact that you trust its neither forge nor counterfeit rests on its multiplicity. We know how currency is supposed to feel. We know how it and dedicates itself to us because we handle so much of it. Thats the paradox of the modern banknote now closing in on two centuries old. How to make something uniquely valuable to the sophistication i would she reproduce it. Hence all of the stamps, the seals, the color shifting inks and security threads the brioche patterns, those cant quite see it at this resolution. But those beautiful dense psychedelic abits a nice coincidence of objects. Its telling that all these patterns share the banknotes that we transact with the signatures writing at the bottom. All major currencies one of my favorite slides ever all major currencies around the world also carry another authentication bore on the board. So girls called the orion constellation. It is a visual arrangement met not for humans but for Image Processing software. It communicates to certain categories of highend desktop publishing systems, adobe photoshop extremely High Precision color copiers that this object with this pattern on it is not to be digitized. Its effectively a mechanism of locking this object out of the capacity to be made digital. Which is actually a beautiful thing to think about. This is a system that makes it possible to produce an analog object that by common consensus a particular set of digital platforms will refuse to touch. Its very strange and somewhat magical thing. What the orion constellation raises for us is the ab difference the challenge of knowledge that Digital Technology introduces to cash. A copy of a banknote is a copy. There will be flaws and imperfections. Whether those are in the paper stock or even missing details in the where on the plates in which the original bill was printed there are ways to know that a copy of a banknote is not authentic. Theres actually a beautiful subculture of people who have the expertise and connoisseurship to be able to recognize the subtle differences in banknotes so even the best counterfeits can theoretically be spotted. But unless its compressed or otherwise deliberately altered, a digital copy can be the original. But for a bit. Easily verified as such. This is a straightforward challenge to authenticity from the perspective of reproduction. Which is real . Both. How do you know which one is authentic . How do you know which one came first . And the question of authenticity extends from duplication to the issue of digital money itself. How do you know a banknote was issued by the institution credited with it. And that its not been altered or tampered in transit. We can spot when someone tries to use a ballpoint pen to make a 10 bill into a 20 bill. How do you know someone hasnt slipped a bit on digital cash to give it an extra zero. Theres one obvious solution to this challenge of how and that brings us to the first why of digital cash. Just keep track of all the money in a master ledger. Like using paper checks or debit cards. That is indeed what the earliest projects in predicting the future of digital cash assumed would be the case. This is Martin Greenberger the computers of tomorrow in the atlantic of may 1964 the same magazine in which a believer bush published as we may think, the landmark document that helped to inspire hypertext. In this greenberger predicts among many other things, which came out more or less true, that computers were going to be dramatically transform the nature of commerce and would do that by the creation of Digital Systems of money and they would do that through total comprehensive surveillance. A system that could quietly police how all money was transacted, who was supposed to have access to what and which electronic notes were authentic, were real, were ritually issued. That attitude changed over the course of the following decade this fantastic article by paul armour whos been at the center for its advanced study of Behavioral Sciences at stanford he worked at rand who worked in the department of defense very much a Johnny Appleseed of american cold war computing this is the article he based on his congressional testimony in which he warned congress of the eminent danger of imbalances in power created by digital surveillance. And in particular for the use of what he calls Electronic Fund transfer system. Efts. He was part of a team at georgetown that was brought together by the think tank on behalf of the State Government to game out the technical ab they were challenged to come up with the best unobtrusive comprehensive Surveillance System they could and after considerable work they designed an Electronic Funds transfer system. Which is to Say Something like our systems of credit and debit cards. The reason being, it gives you a time stamped geocoded place in which you engage in every aspect of your life that involves any form of transaction images you data about the transaction and of its computerized and in real time it can react to your purchases to, for example, decline your ability to purchase something the state has decided you should not have. Realtime price gouging and redlining deliberate forms of almost completely invisible coercion control over assets. This was not that long after, its easy to forget that atwoods marvelous and horrific sense, marvelous book the handmaids tale begins as a nightmare about electronic money. One of the first moves of the project of gilead and disenfranchising all the women is to use databanks to identify women who have assets of any kind and then freeze those assets. Makes them unavailable, lock them out of their own credit. As atwood said in an interview she kept emphasizing, everyone kept missing it which is talking about the novel immediately afterwards she said now that everyone uses Electronic Systems of credit its very easy to deny people access to credit. She indeed envisioned iliad as a society built on systems of monetary surveillance and coercion. The scene from the show is based on the scene in the book in which oped in the background sees oranges for the first time in years and longs to get one but of course cant because shes not been given any money that lets her by oranges. Shes only been given coupons for other things. Theres no way she can freely engage in transactions or accumulate value for herself shes issued money thats only good for one specific purpose. In a way that makes it so she can be tracked and monitored and controlled. s responses were not slow in coming to this. This was the first why of why create digital cash. Its to fight the exact fears of surveillance. This is where we see the work of people like david chum, most notably in this phase, trying to build nothing less than transaction systems to make big brother obsolete. His particular project the project of what he called did you cash summarize by abwhom we will come back to in a second was to make withdrawing money from your bank account as easy to do digitally as it was physically and with an equivalent protection for your privacy. So that when you withdraw money whether digital cash or physical cash you then have that cash in hand and there is theoretically no way to connect the notes that you withdrawn to your particular identity if there withdraw her. You can give them to be will circulate them make purchases when they are redeposited they go back into an identified account but they are circulation is anonymous. This was an inspiration for a huge set of other projects, david chum opened up a vast design space in which other people try to find ways to work indeed a small Cottage Industry of which this article was a part involved in digging out how to circumvent his patents in various ways and try to either build your own or add it into the industry without having to pay chum anything. But in this case, for this particular article among many, abin a very different why then david chum did for why it was worthwhile focusing on electronic cash. Why it was worth trying to evolve it. He is a great figure for historian because his life was like one of those wonderful scorsese tracking shops that takes you through a whole new you a whole new subculture a whole new scene because finney navigated through so many different subcultures and communities and projects. Following him is going to show us the three other wives of digital cash that we will be talking about today and how they all came together toward the end of the millennium. Finney was a member of the Loose Network of software developers, political activist and cryptography activist who called themselves the cipher punks. The cipher punks were interested in privacy of course as their name might suggest but also in the possibility of a holy computational currency one that was native to the internet that will not only assure anonymity of transactions but operate outside the remit of territorial governments entirely. The cipher punk gad slide Timothy C May used to have this on the signature of his emails and online posts along with various clever jokes about crimes and lyrics from the talking heads. This is his plan this was his vision this was his mission, crypto anarchy. It was a description of the master plan that he argued was logically inevitable with the spread of strong encryption the spread of anonymous digital cash with power new off the books global black markets anonymous markets, synonymous markets and Information Networks and Money Laundering schemes which would ultimately lead as the end of the list implies to the collapse of the nationstate. The collapse of government. Thats the second why of why build digital cash. Not just to transact dollars and privacy but to adopt new currencies that would pull their users steadily out of a relationship with their own governments may his work was a direct influence on Julian Assange and russ all brought aba pretty interesting batting average for a retired intel engineer posting manifestoes on usenet. But this why of creating digital cash raised another hell. If the currency is not being managed, however indirectly by central banks, and produced by mix, then how much currency should be produced . Who decides that . How is that amount verified . And how do you mention individual token and how do you know the token you are transacting is real . Like several other cipher punks, finney developed prilosec toy currencies which builds on the work of others in the scene to propose a kind of computational challenge in the governing mechanism. I hasten to add finney was absolutely not alone in this. Part of the historians job is to always be like, there were many other people and many of them all new finney and collaborate he just makes a nice thorough line. So he envisioned building on other peoples work, the idea of a unit of verifiable work that a computer would have to do to produce a new token, a proof of work whose cost can regulate the volume of money a mechanism you could build to replace the system sub human decision directed central banks. Also let q email address very provocative edge lords. The technological roots of the project, this was abhe made his own logo. This is finneys design for reusable proofs of work as early prototype currency in which part of what would govern the production of new money was a Computers Work it would have to contribute which could be measured and verified by other people. The technological roots of the project delay and ideas for how to deal with email spam, another challenge of creating a kind of price for something that was effectively free and thereby prevent a flood of worthless paper. But for many of its enthusiasts the Cultural Roots of the project had less to do with reinventing postage than with reinventing goals. This is the third why based on a complex set of political commitments to a currency backed by Precious Metals. I find the slide very amusing and then i realize that people may not recognize this is goldfinger from the james bond movie pointing to fort knox as part of his plan to make gold radioactive. The absorption with goals which characterize this next part of my talk. This is the third why of making digital cash based on a complex set of commitments to currency backed by Precious Metals. The desire however paradoxical it might seem to combine the ease and liquidity of online commerce and transactions with the particular physical constraints of gold. Its scarcity the challenge of its aband deflationary character its portability. And i have to say what hg wells called its magnificent stupid honesty. Gold meant all of that to the people who believed in it however unreal of putting the money supply outside the control of government regulation and special baking. This version of the digital cash project drew on the work of the real pioneers of online payments. A subculture of socalled dgc sword digital gold currencies. Years before paypal companies with names like e gold and picnic were doing massive transaction volume and ownership stakes in grains and grams of gold and silver. Stored in facilities from london and antwerp to coeur dalene idaho and dubai. This particular artifact is from the Liberty Dollar silver system, not a bank, we hasten to add, which was attempting to create their own circulated bull notes which were not notes of currency as such but instead ownership receipts were some volume of precious metal physically stored on a bunch of pallets in a warehouse in idaho. They would also as soon as they were able to issue paper receipts issued digital receipts and come up with their own ledger transition systems so you can pay and be paid in these precious metal accounting tokens. This version of the digital cash project drew on the work a aim sorry, i already said that part. These had the ideology, the anonymity, the network ease of use and scarcity of ashes metal. And they were fragile, brittle, and required a tremendous amount of trust on the part of their users. It was like buying a cell and someone elses spreadsheet, a gram of the bar with its essay marks and chain of custody documents sitting on a pallet in a warehouse which very likely never saw with your holdings stored on somebody elses server. When someone dropped a dime on the operation or the secret service got wind of your solar notes in circulation everyones assets got tagged and bagged and thrown in a van for the eventual trial. Your home network could be distributed but the gold was it. Mother was the ledger. All of your assets walked out the door with the us marshals. Of course i should say that the reason why the quality on these materials is so bad is the best source for archives on the digital solar currency scheme in idaho is the fbi. All the stuff left over from their various documents that they released publicly. Which provokes of course another how, how could he build a system where the ledger of ownership and the scarce materials of value were as distributed as the owner centric doctors were. Soon he was empathetic to the goals not the means of the digital gold currencies. Of particular importance for people digital cash projects wasnt just the scarcity of gold. The particular cultures of knowledge that gold produced. Its like going back to the archives of archivist. Its this meticulously maintained sheet that tell you how a bar was created every single time it was tested in every single shelf it is sent on in every country and every context. Every time its cabinet was open every time someone physically handled it it should maybe ring a bell for us in terms of block chain knowledge. Proposed ideas for digital cash as a kind of verifiable collective log of the production and volume of money. Something that would allow them to somehow measure and snapshot the overall shape and quantity of their money in the world and the way they could more or less to do for Precious Metals. I started going to libertarian events in New Hampshire in the mid20 teens i was i was working on this book because they were the only places i could find were casual daytoday transactions were being conducted in crypto currencies. And Precious Metals. Im sure you can guess but the reason why you can buy things for specific values of dated coins is because of the changing volume of Precious Metals in time the metallic of silver half dollars of quarters and dimes changed on the dates that they note. New hampshire libertarian hobby to get rolls and rolls of quarters and dimes from the bank and then hang out in your house at night going to them with a bright lamp looking for the characteristics sparkle that help you identify the pre19 624 quarters and then returning all the rest. I just kind of cycling to the banks own inventory this way. He would go to like buy socks or chile or what have you and at a libertarian enclave event and the transactions can be conducted by smart phone in bitcoin or cerium or double coin when it was still a thing or through transacting silver. There was a very specific question how is it the people who like this one thing, like the other. Its because of the way in which both of them could theoretically be known. The way in which, as one mentor said to me when i asked him about his why he got interested in silver as money, he looked at me baffled and said silver is silver and the weight is the weight. [laughter] a civic knowability. The fourth and last why of making digital cash and in some ways the strangest the most oddly beautiful but still closely connected to the previous three begins in this magazine which is the same issue where finney was explaining david childs system of digital cash. This issue of extra p the journal of transhumanist thought finney was an extra p. M. As well as cyberpunk and someone on the margins of the digital gold currency and libertarian currency world. An extra p and a member of a remarkable almost forgotten network of technologists, philosophers, futurists and bay area weirdos at the end of the century. Many of the key individuals who played a role in the creation of bitcoin work stroke begins at one point or another. Including virtually everyone outside the sciences who was cited in providing inspiration for the technology and most the people who kick the tires and help to get the key ideas going for it. The extra pins were focused on the creation of the future of limitless abundance on a cosmic scale. More energy, more information, more time more space more intelligence more life. ablibertarian philosophy and austrian freemarket economics they believe the path to abundance lay through technological innovation accelerated by market so free that the phrase free markets barely does them justice. This was one of many mock currencies they created nominated in high x, the austrian economist. An extraordinarily influential figure the 20th century. Much to our detriment. Issue from the virtual bank of extrapolates and this is filled with in jokes about the future of the extra pms were sure they were going to be a part of. The first thing they thought had to be free to create the ultra free markets that would create the radical Technological Breakthroughs they hope for was money itself. New forms of future oriented currency distributed by stateless decentralized banks would be their vehicles out of the earths gravity well. They wanted to build currencies that bet on the future of being rich beyond measure from which they could profit today. And indeed many of the key extra p. M. Currency experiments are notable for how experimental they were. Attempts to build reputational currencies where you could bet on how wildly successful you and the rest of your friends on this mailing list were going to be idea coupons of which i believe i may hold one of the only remaining idea coupons which i intend to claim which were notes which were designed to mature if and only a particular prediction came to pass. You can effectively buy into that prediction almost as if you are betting on a kick starter except for the likelihood of say a computer capable of some number of teraflops of operation or some number of living humans on the surface of mars by such and such date or successful brain reanimation. They made one other bet on the future of limitless abundance, bet to take the melancholy staying out of the idea they would lay the groundwork for posthuman immortality and then die a decade or two before it panned out. Which presented its own problem for digital cash. The highlighted name there, felix someone was an entrepreneur and a professional techno optimist in the 1970s and 80s. Notable for among other stops reading the entirety of the Space Shuttle budget into the congressional record as part of its arguments that the Space Shuttle was artificially depressing the value of the private industry spaceflight market. Theres a really fascinating book to be written about fallon who is an interesting character who basically lived in advance of his own context more or less perpetually. Indeed it was widely discussed his information marketplace system the American Information Exchange was effectively a version of the entire internet he was trying to build from scratch by himself in the early 1980s. Its a singularly bizarre project. By the late 1980s phil was dying of pancreatic cancer. Preparing to have himself frozen. One of the issues he discussed with Timothy C May the cyberpunk sort of gadabout who is a friend of his was how to create a kind of money an asset class that could hold its value into the far future secured from taxation or seizure, available to phils password when he was reanimated. Indeed they talked about how the password itself would be a kind of threshold. It would mean your brain would have to be able to be reconstructed with so much accuracy that the password would be able to be recalled from it in order to unlock your assets. The kind of prize a kind of reverse taunting for being able to bring its own creator back from the dead. This is from the log of people being frozen d animation date is bear term up there. In which itself if Everyone Wants to do this, writing an experimental novel or nonfiction study thats just an essay about everyone who is currently on ice would be an amazing snapshot of a particular corner of the 20 century. The need to freeze though meant that the kinds of currencies they were envisioning needed to simultaneously accelerate social and technological change to bring about the world that would be able to bring them back while also remaining themselves as safe and secure as real estate or treasury bonds. Another tall order a kind of money that could keep your wealth for you while also disrupting the context in which your wealth existed. Perhaps impossible. An attention that plays out in much contemporary digital cash still. Im fascinated by this picture this is part of the d animation process. I always wonder with the women on the left is thinking as she gazes down at the corpse. To produce the technologies to prepare machines and bring occupants out into the future they wanted to reach. This is the fourth why of digital cash as it ended up being produced after the millennium. As a paradox as a motor of unstoppable invention that was also a fantasy of eternal downturn proof security. I think speaking very practically those of you who know people in the world speculating on crypto currencies may recognize this exact paradox. Which is simultaneously a wildly volatile rocket to the stars of prosperity. Somehow both things at once its rare to find an asset like that. The occupants of this room of deepfreeze tasks includes health any, but to close here with this tweet. This is vinnie again, he was a correspondent of satoshi and okamoto, a recipient of the Second Bitcoin transaction, he provided a great deal of technical and critical feedback on the creation of the first draft of the new system. Indeed, aside from not a himself he could probably be construed as the most important person in the early days of bitcoin. Even though as he was working on it he was beginning to get sicker and sicker. He and his family ultimately sold their Bitcoin Holdings to defray the cost of his medical treatment for als, lou gehrigs disease, for which he would pass away in 2014. This is the moment i want to actually stop talk even though it might seem like a strange ending for a talk about money because money is ultimately always about the future. One of the deep questions we should think about is to quote john mader and kings. In the long run we are all dead. The future is where we go to br kerrick archivist at full also defeats. It ended on a super bleak note. Im in a bleak mood, its a bleak time right now. For the benefit of americas wonderful Television System cspan, which we could not be more tickled about. We will be on cspan book talk which is one of my favorite things in the world. Its good to be us and congressional testimony. Its drawing a line something out speaking about when you showed you were at the libertarian gathering in New Hampshire and theres only specific coins or specific coins have certain values. If you go to certain countries they will only accept american dollars. Or only 20 bills in certain years. Anything prior to 2009 or something theres like this weird line between if you have power and you dont have power and the different uses of money and the different values we place on it. I think theres two dimensions to this question that are especially interesting to think about in terms of how we talk about things like crypto currencies. Which are that the first is the idea of fungibility. All money of a particular kind is fungible. They are all units that can be exchanged for one another. With specific instantiations but in practice thats not the case. Money is actually highly particular. Or people operating in a context where for statewide reasons, federal reasons particular builds before a new period when news abtheres a whole economy that got flooded with extremely good fig notes. Which were the last i heard most likely printed using old equipment from east germany that got sold off and ended up with north korea. Were they had fantastic facilities for producing really beautiful notes. Those effectively killed off the ability of certain classes of dollars from for a particular period to circulate. Those dollars really arent fungible. They actually exist in different regimes of knowledge of being able to understand and verify that something is likely or not but even more than that, i think this goes more into questions of power in the future. As we learn from behavioral economics and wonderful work by people like viviana seltzer. We dont treat even money that we are self hold the same way. Results are has of course written and incredible length and depth about the question of how we, we all do this, you will get 20 by chance or someone they will be like this is my fun 20. I get to spend this on anything because i didnt earn it. The process called earmarking. It seems like the trivial thing we all engage in an ordinary life. The stash of, i cant swear because were on television but the stash of whats called a few money that people cumulate in businesses or in marriages as a way of providing a kind of security against the prospect of things changing. All of that is theoretically fungible money except you earmarked it mentally to mean Different Things to you. One of the kind of most salient questions for that we use our thoughts about how money is earmarked to tell are so story about the future. Thats another place money has the anticipatory function to help us imagine different ways of life. To help us feel differently ab one particular useful element of going to all the libertarian things was being able to encounter people for whom transacting money was an expression of power not in the way that for almost everyone it is, not in the sense of being able to have the power to do something or express the power over someone else. Again very active transacting choosing what you would transact in was a sign of commitment to a particular society like to a particular set of ideas. In the libertarian context to hear a lot of dismissive referrals to people trying to buy things using frns which stands for Federal Reserve notes which is to say dollars. Those things come up that trash. One of the kind of fascinating and deeply peculiar things about the New Hampshire context was all these places where people would go to tremendous trouble to figure out how to transact the earliest bulky is the weirdest versions of bitcoin persontoperson with their smart phones we have to go over to the hillside where you can get receptions so you could actually successfully get it to work and it would settle for 10 minutes and all the rest of it they would do that for like a pair of socks but the point was, the gesture the performance of engaging in a transaction that as it were like cut you out of the society that you did not want to be a part of. It allowed you to identify a different set of social practices. One of the reasons why russ albritton started silk road was because he is very committed to this sort of, even within what ive learned studying working on this book is that they all have an 1 version of what libertarianism is. Russ aldrich was an ingress among other things which is a group that basically tries to bring down the pernicious state through many transactions which take place out of the state context. Part of the reason for starting the silk road was not simply to become the Pablo Escobar of the internet or of the tour network but also to create a space in which people would get used to the idea of engaging in secret transactions outside of taxation systems that were making use of bitcoin. To basically has it were, use drugs as the attractor to the real point, which was that you would be like integrated into this antistate economy. You know the rule of craigslist is that the reason why the goods are cheap is because you have to smell some strangers house. But the same token, one of the greatest challenges for transaction crypto currencies is having to give a speech of why its important that you transacting in the crypto currency and watch somebodys youtube videos think about that as not as being exceptional but not unique abas being exceptional but not new unique. Part of the nature of money itself is that it embodies cultural practices and beliefs. It was super robust. [inaudible question] the government treats this transaction system the way it does, they think cannot be realized and in fact may be the traditional cash system and credit card because of the ways the government treats them provides more secrecy and anonymity and some cases and if the government wants to go to the citibank and ask like why and when and where you bought something, they need a judge to Say Something. But im not sure about u. S. But in other countries bitcoins are treated in a way where they are particularly unprotected from these kinds of surveillance and easily accessible to whoever wants to serve value. How much this utopia we actually realized. Thats a fantastic question, theres two aspects with the first is more of a practical aspect which i think in some ways part of the story i wanted to tell today part of the story the book tells the way in which the same technology ended up having to bear the weight of fundamentally conflicting agendas. Different ways to accomplish in a way that i think anyone who has Done Software development can recognize that nightmare Mission Creek where its like it started as a messaging app but i guess now we are also a calendar . And were also good to be able to read email its like an ebook reader in there because were like a book club pack format. Weve all experienced this to work in the space in a grander sense part of this is because as the Technology Gets negotiated as its actually being designed and produced it often ends up having to take on a series of different projects. Part of what i wanted to help capture today is as we go to each why, its both evolving from the previous one or diverging from it. One of the things that fascinates me about david jones work the first why the private protection did you cash project is it actually work. It works extraordinarily well but ultimately did not take off, the company didnt take off but did you cash it self provided precisely what he promised in the layers are focused way. A method by which it transact existing money anonymously online or in person entirely digitally. The moment it starts to shift into yes but for ideological reasons we do on a transact u. S. Dollars want to transact their own currency that we generated as a whole new layer of difficulty to that and part of that new layer of difficulty is how do we verify how much of this is actually in circulation. And if you want it to function in a way thats more like a deflationary thing like gold that it adds yet another layer which is how are we going to keep track of who has the rights to transact which thing at which point. His system for had had a flaw that was also a feature which is that you could lose your digital cash. Mike if you had it on a card and you left the card in a taxi it was like you left them envelope full of cash in the taxi. The benefit of that was also function that way because it was truly anonymous tokens with no connection no race course for that. Wire as of the time you get in ross is a great example of this, a single break in the chain enables you to deanonymize a vast swath of activity and quickly reconstruct the graphs of the whole Payment Networks and transaction systems. Its not just like a utopia that failed rather one of my favorite books, book thats very dear to become a big inspiration for writing this is a book by the american historian and novelist margaret young. Partially maybe because she spent the second half of her career writing a thousand page novel very difficult to read. The other was a radically atheist socialist utopia that was trying to turn people into machines. In some ways part of the reason i kept going back to the book was the digital cash was kind of a story like that not just a story about the failure of utopia is a story about series of utopias each trying to supersede or the process of trying to reconcile those is now the complex web in which book Chain Developers are now stuck as they try to regret had a balance all the promises of the original white paper which features a great weasel word in it which is along with promising like you dont need trusted third parties to verify transactions. Trans actors can be anonymous it ended up carrying a lot of weight for people and i think it really speaks to the fact that abthe newsgroup postings he also understood this to be something that was trying to solve a couple different problems at once. Not necessarily solving all of them in the same way. Obviously all the subsequent developments weve seen people trying to figure out what do we really want digital cash to be and can we custombuilt to that . When you look at the magazine cash we see something thats wrong trying to fork over in the direction of anonymity rather than preciousness. I am on fire in terms of long answer. I apologize. Im enjoying thinking through the stories. One of the themes building on that that i thought was most interesting when i was reading is how all of these utopian motivators these libertarian enclaves are really motivated by their fear of emergencies and bazaar blown out of proportion dystopias that they have envisioned and im wondering if when you spoke to these communities whether they recognized that tension between this extreme optimism and extreme dystopian is him as well as whether they differentiated all between their missed trust in government and their mistrust in corporate surveillance and whether those are the same things to them. Thats a fantastic question. Thats another sort of, its another to read in the book and another big thread in how i think we construe money broadly which is how we think about money in terms of crisis. One of the things that haunts the production of money especially in the 20th century s questions of what regulates it slow and what happens in states of emergency when i used to do this informal poll would i be talking to technical audiences about some of the history whats the first thing you think of when you think of a monetary emergency eye it was shocking how many people thought of the weimar hyperinflation. Which may sound somewhat obscure it when they say it like that but the images of that particular moment of printed money, printed currency, banknotes that had become so devalued they been carried around in wheelbarrows and used to insulate houses retained in incredible potent quality of memory for people who are concerned about the idea of monetary emergency. Now perhaps like venezuela is replacing it, zimbabwe may be hungry. The tricky thing is to do is articulate the history of monetary emergencies from the particular role that emergency plays in the libertarian imaginary United States. Which i think is well worth thinking about when we talk about bitcoins. Even though bitcoin is a global story another u. S. Story i think its significant to remember that it emerges in the exact moment to the date halloween night of 2009 the moment when the ted spread in the United States for 2008 2009. Suddenly unblinking. Forgive me. This is the worst thing for a historian. You get a date wrong. [ im suddenly blanking on oneness financial aba moment of massive financial crisis the middle of the global credit freeze a real sense of open freefall. Encoded into the block chain itself in the very earliest blocks of the big chain is a timestamp which is the headline in the times about the second major bailout being made for banks. It was like something being marked as a currency that was emerging at an exact moment of crisis when it could like be when theres a context for why it should be widely adopted instead of other things. This is i think in some ways building on a set of ideologies about money that comes out of a very specifically american context. Which is the sense of future urgency as an investment strategy. The idea that like the existing system is going to collapse. Ive been reading so much literature and you can go back like clockwork, decade by decade United States is going to be a road Warrior Health scape of people siphoning gas out of cars and fighting for food in the supermarkets within five years. Its been like that for 50 years. Every five years in the future theres never been a definite disaster but whats most salient about that disaster is the fact that the disaster functions not as something to avert but as something to embrace. By embracing it you get to the better system. You get to a Better Process of we might call it emergence by emergency by embracing the idea that everything is going to fall apart instead of trying to get involved in some advocacy a ashe can uses as a way of selling people your Silver Dollar certificate. Like theres a huge economy of like emergency survivalist sales like all these places where people pay top dollar for the buckets of freezedried food and the fish antibiotics and all the rest of it. Its within that context that we need to think about that is the future for money. That actually shapes ways people think about money. I think we should not underestimate how much the adoption of crypto currencies is still to some degree shaped by how it was initially connected with states of emergency and fears of states of emergency. Like a lot of the earliest attempts to sell bitcoin to a general public involve people like my favorite antiheroes who shows up in the book. This guy named Roger Berliner who is basically a citizenship entrepreneur and a bitcoin evangelist is now involved with liber land like the attempt to take over contested island in the danube and make it into a block chain based utopia but at the time in like 2010 he started a business trying to sell people secondary Solutions Tips for bitcoin for selected the passports for bitcoin business. The whole premise of it was that people who are interested in bitcoin believed an emergency is coming. People who are interested in bitcoin are a market for this kind of thing because theyre convinced theyre in danger. I think we need to partially understand the part of the legacy that crypto currencies may still be in the process of overcoming is the way in which they were initially created with such a specific framework of the future. Within which the conversations that i personally recall from this world and what 2010 2011 i like bitcoins being adopted in cyprus in the middle of the financial freeze like bitcoins being adopted by refugees like this was the marketplace. People who had lost access to other financial tools and now moving into the space was always the following assumption from the people i was talking to my interviewees and my informants that this was coming for us and that the smart thing to do would be to get into bitcoin now seek to have it with you when you fled with your bag on your back through the dust storm. I think the framework of crisis is a really interesting want to look at not just historically but also now obviously. Part of what is especially striking about our current moment is all of the ways in which people are trying to negotiate what it means to think about a future in crisis and how we should manage that or think about that financially. [inaudible question] it goes along with the very american idea that will all be millionaires. It has to have both of those. I know thats interesting. In many ways its a good way of thinking about the kind of constituent attention that lays at the heart not just of early crypto currencies but of a lot of different kinds of what we might think about more experiment is they often have to a sustain this paradox of crisis and promise. The fundamental problem of extra p. M. History was trying to strike the balance between we are Building Systems that will make it so that every thing we construe as the meaning of human life is meaningless because we wanted to be in our bodies anymore we wont die, i will be some kind of robot tiger. You will be a brain and a squid and we will be living in a satellite. All the rest of it at the same time healing to the idea that you still have your wealth and your wealth will still mean something it will still be significant that you have access to these resources. There something extremely robust about internal paradox. As long as you can maintain for yourself the internal paradox that a terrible crisis is going the food network ab. [screaming]. And it is a chance for you to clean up. And chance for you to make good by catastrophe. That in the way is something we should think about not just something that has a flaw but instead of something where we to understand the logical flow works. Right. Why does it actually might be a selfsustaining system for people who adopt it. [inaudible conversation] you all for your time. [applause]. The new cspan2 online store, now his boutique products. Go to cspan2 stop. Org to check them out. See whats new for boutique. In all of the cspan2 products. Good evening everyone. Thank you for joining us tonight. My name is kate and on behalf of the sponsor, i am delighted to welcome you to this evening news event. Is i can take a new book, gender