What Bitcoin Has To Do With The Dream Of Cryonics

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Tracy, remember the episode we did a few weeks ago with David Schaum?

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

I certainly do. That was a great episode.

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

Yeah, I love that episode. And in part because, you know, I feel like of all this, you know, talk about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies these days, and really over the last couple of years, while a lot of the conversation is very forward looking, people are trying to figure out where it's going to go next, what the technology could be used for, how big things could get.

I find it very fruitful to actually look backwards. And before even figuring out where it's going to go next, trying to think about where it came from and some of the problems that the early people involved in the space were trying to solve.

Tracy Alloway (1:02)

Oh, absolutely. And I think whenever you're talking about new technologies, there's obviously, for very clear reasons, a tendency to focus on what's happening next and the future. And just trying to refocus a little bit of attention on the problems of the past is really useful. And often, there's a reason that things have happened the way they did in the past. And it tells you something instructive about the future as well.

Joe Weisenthal (1:30)

Right, so Bitcoin has basically been around 10 years and it's been obviously an extraordinary run. But the people who are involved, we don't really know who exactly invented Bitcoin. Obviously, that is a pseudonymous creator.

But people were working on Bitcoin-like problems for years before Bitcoin came about, how to develop sort of digital internet money in one way or another. David Schaum was one of them. Anyway, part of the reason we booked David is I was inspired from having read a book earlier in the year about this entire prehistory. And I thought it was so fascinating.

And today, I'm excited because we're going to be talking to the author of the book, and it's really all about the long period leading up to Bitcoin, the different ways people were working on it.

Tracy Alloway (2:22)

I must admit, I haven't been able to read the entire book. I'm still in my Korean reading phase, and I'm now reading a very long history of the Korean War. But I have skimmed it.

It looks really interesting. And I think one of the things that comes through is that the idea of cryptocurrencies has always been sort of inextricably linked to a particular system of either values or sort of hopes and dreams for the future.

Joe Weisenthal (2:51)

Yeah, that's exactly right. So on the one hand, it's kind of a technological breakthrough, and the technology is important, but really it's about values and politics and morals and sort of the relationship that we have with big technology companies or big government, things like that. And so without further ado, I want to bring in our guests. We're going to be speaking with Finn Brunton. He is an NYU professor and the author of the newly released book, Digital Cash, The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians and Technologists, Who Created Cryptocurrency.

Fascinating book, very excited to have the author. Finn Brunton, thank you very much for joining us.

Finn Brunton (3:32)

Thank you for having me.

Joe Weisenthal (3:33)

So I just wanted to say, I love this book and I'm trying to get as many people to read it and I've tweeted about it a few times and advocated. I think it's going to be one of the reads of the year, but I'm curious why you wrote the book. How did you get started on trying to really uncover the prehistory of digital currency?

Finn Brunton (3:54)

I was originally trained as a historian of science and technology. And one of the things that you learn when you work on that subject is how much the technologies around us, the things that made our built world, the things we use every day, both are there because of what they can do, but also because of what they can mean often because of the hopes and promises and fears and visions and histories that are wrapped up in them. So with that in mind, years ago I was working on a project about spam and I noticed how spammers were starting to adopt a lot of new weird currencies that I had never heard of before. This is even in the pre-Bitcoin days, but they were looking at currencies that were things like digital gold currencies in the 1990s, other ways to move money around that could protect them from the eyes of the law and various other forms of reprisal.