Bitcoin at 10

AS BITCOIN TURNS 10, a new book aims to chronicle the digital currency’s ideological origins. “The technology alone is not enough,” Finn Brunton writes in Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency. “Even with good math, scientific discoveries, the free circulation of ideas, reliable hardware and running code, you need a desire, a vision, a dissatisfaction, a fantasy, a story.” The source of that story was a movement called the cypherpunks, which started to coalesce in the late 1980s. In turn, the cypherpunks did not appear sui generis but were the culmination of decades—centuries, really—of broadly libertarian thought and activism.

Brunton, who teaches in New York University’s media department, first offers an overview of the history of monetary authentication, then traces cryptocurrencies’ roots to several offbeat subcultures. He finds precursors ranging even voyages into the niche waters of seasteading, an old idea that has garnered new interest since the early 2000s.