Readers. Thank you, everyone. Its such a pleasure to be here and ive really enjoyed this opopportunity to talk to you about the by far the most peculiar book ive ever written in a longshot. I hope to share that with you today as well as frame some of the questions and issues that it raises. This is a book of one how and several competing whys. The how is, h would you go about creating a digital equivalent for currency, cash and coin . This is a significant technical challenge. You need to create an object trivial to transact, impossible to forge. It must be easy to verify to prove it is what it claims to be under conditions and con saints for all kinds of people and it must be able to carry the information about what it is and what its worth without generating information about how its used for by whom. And it has to do this on platforms, networks a and machines that generate effectively perfect copies and transaction laws and records in their very functioning. In other words, figuring out the how of how to make Something Like cash digital is a very tall order indeed. Which raises the question of why you would need to build such a thing. And answering that question will take us from fighting surveillance to building parallel covert societies, to libertarian theories of economics and money to the pursuit of human immortality. Al of these generations and why he is, a, into the bitcoin and cryptocurrency and block chain of today. Its not just building a platform for transactional instruments, but a technological project and utopian one. I like to call it projects both in speculation, but speculative fiction. These current is is were platforms, not just to bet on future outcomes, but to aid in their imagining, as i introduce them, theyll be accompanied by prototypes, as athletics and stories and practices, seeking to inspire fear or hope. To avert future conditions or to invoke them to appear. These are currencies that function not just in relation to the future as all money does, but artifacts from it. One of the things i came to enjoy working most on learning about as i was wking on this book, was how people who work in the currency world talk about currency. Its been one of the many many terms of arts that they developed in the passing current, a way of talking about howw something actually functions as money. Th passing current is something that you accept because you believe that someone else will take it from yo in the future, right . So you take it and it passes to you and passes to someone else, which is to say that the passing current, which is what gives currency its like money, time, temporalityty name and anticipates, to hold currency is to anticipate a future in which the currency will be accepted by you, payment of taxes, given to a merchant for goods, a gift exchange, you nameit. Part of what this books ends up bebeing about is not necessaril currency, but how the people end up using currency to imagine a future where something will be of value, in widespread use. In other words, holding and 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 bank not faces a very peculiar challenge. It must be able to prove itself der an extremely demanding range of conditions and to do so to the untrained user. Right . Every time that you like go to get a movie ticket and you see that sign up that they have, thats like we no longer accept 50 bills or when you receive these bills, use this pen on them in the following way. Those are all like moments of the necessary training of figuring out how to actually verify what currency is, how to makeke paper bank notes prove themselves. That is, a paper bank note must be able to authentate itself to you personally in the moment as you hanandle it and to the whole of society in general so you can pass it in turn and convince everyone through the transaction chain that its neither forged nor counterfeit. Lets take a 20 bill, 20s are dear to my heart after working on this book, i became fascinated with them. Theyre Beautiful Technology in evereryday life. Its a product of authenticating authority. In the United States the Federal Reserve the network of mints and the small secretive textile and chemical and Printing Companies that specialize in the production of secured paper. Theyre amazing, by y the way. I dont thin i will be able to do this, but i long to write a book just about the process of making secure paperworork. Its an amazing art form and under appreciated. But this document, this bill has to function without recourse to any of these authorities, in that a u. S. 20 has a working lifee span of five to seven years and will be transacted thousands of times its life span under every kind of condition, under all kinds of circumstances, passing in and out of banks, before ultimately being withdrawn from circulation, and destroyed. There is a marvellous history to be written by someone about the relationship between the secret service and the producti of prop money for movies. Because the movies need huge lumes of cash, right . Youve got to have something to show when you open the suitcase andhe secret service carefully looks at how its produced, looking believabl on camera, but not enough to accept. One secret Service Agent said, if its green and has 20 on it, someone is going to accept it. So these bills have to be able to function in a context where its green and has 20 on it, someone is eventually going to take itbut still have to somehow police themselves to the extent that that doesnt ultimately ruin the currencys ability to function. So, what this means is that each bills realness and uniqueness, its singularity that you trust its not forge or counterfeit. We know how currency is supposed to feel, what it looks like, how it autheicates itself and thats the paradox of the modern bank note now closing in on two centuries old. How to make somethi uniquely valuable by the sophisticationn by which you produce it. Hence the heraldic state bri brickabrac, the stamps, the seals, color shifting inks a security threads. The patterns, you cant quite see it at this resolution, but those sort of beautiful sense psychedelic patterns that weave around on the face of currency, those are the products of a tool called the rosen begin lathe, identified as specifically being good for this because it could mechanically, quickly produce patterns exceedingly hard for the human hand to reproduce. And the other place you see rosen begin lathe work on fab faberge eggs and the signatures writing at the bottom, archaic proofs of the precise hand reproduction. All major currencies, one of my favorite slide er. All major currencies around the world carry another authencation technology, a pattern of circles, called the orion constellation. Its visual made not for humans, but Image Processing software tcommunicates to certain categories of high end publishing system, adobe shop, and color copiers, this pattern is not to be digitized. Its a mechanism of locking this object out of the capacity to be made digital. Its a systemm that makes it possible to make an analog object by common concensus, digital platforms will refuse to touch. Its a strange and somewhat magical thing. What the orion constellations raises for us is the challenge of knowledge that Digital Technology introduces to cash. Because in practical terms, a copy of a bank note is a copy. There willll be flaws and imperfections, whether those are in the paper stock or even missing details in the wear o the plates on which the original bill was plated. There are ways to know that a copy of a bank note is not authenc, a beautiful subculture of people who have the expertise and connoisseurship who can recognize the bank notes and, but unless its compressed or otherwise deliberately altered, a digital copy can be the original. Bit for bit, easily verified as such. This is a straight forward challenge to awe ten authenticity. Which is real . Both, how do you know which is authentic and which comes first . Its to the issue of digital money itself. How do you know that a bank note was issued by the institution, credited with it . And that its not been altered or tampered in transit, right . We can spot when someone tries to use a ballpoint pen to use a 10 into a 20. How do you know that someone hasnt flipped a bit on your digital cash with an extra zero. Theres a how and that brings us to the first why. Digital cash. Keep track of money in a ledger, just like using paper checks or debit cards and thats indeed what the earliest project in pre ducting the future of digital cash assumed would be the case. This is t the computers of tom, in the atlantic much may 1964. The same magazines in which bush published as we may think, the landmark document that helped to inspire hypertext and greenberg predicts many other things which became more or less true that computers were going to dramatilly transform commerce. And they would do that through comprehensive surveillance, a system that could quietly police how money was trance acted. Who would have access to what and which electronic notes were authentic, real were truly issued. That attitude changed over the course of the folwing decade this fantastic aicle by paul armor, who has been at the center for advanced study, Behavioral Sciences at stanford, worked at the department of defense, the johnnie appleseed of cold war computing. He warned congress of the imminent danger of imbalances in power created by digital surveillce and in particular, by the use of what he calls electronic funds transfer system. He was part of a team at georgetown that was brought together by a think tank on behalf of the state department to game out the technological future of the soviet union. And one of the things that they were challenged with is to come upith the best unobtrusive Surveillance System he 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 geo coded place in which you engage in every aspect of your life that involves any form of transaction and gives you data about at transaction and if its computerized and in realtime. It can react to your purchases to, for example, decline your ability to purchase something that the state decided you should n not have. Realime price gouging and red lining, control over assets. This was not that long after. Easy to forget, i think, that atwoods, marvellous sense. And the hand maids tale, is about money. One of the first moves of gilead is to use data banks to identify women who has assets of any kind and freezes assets and makes them unavailable and locks themm out of their own credit. As atwood said in a interview, she kept empsizing it and missing when she was talking about the novel immediately afterward. Now that everyone uses electronic credit, its easy to deny people access to credit and she easily envisions gilliard of systems around monetary systems and coeron. The scene from the show is based on thealfred in the background sees oranges for the firms time in years and shes not been given money for oranges, only for other things. Theres no way to accumulate value for herself. Issued money good for one specific purpose in a way that makes it so she can be tracked, monitored and controlled. And responses were not slow in coming to this. This is the first big why of why eate digital cash and its to fht those exact fears of surveillance that electronic transactions porteed for the future. This is where we s the work of people like david cham, who is trying to build nothing less, as he says, than transaction systems to make big brother obsolete. His project, what he called digicash to make it as easily to withdraw digitally or physically. If you withdraw it, cash in hand, and there is theoretically no way to conct the notes that you have withdrawn to your particular identity as their withdrawer. You can give them to people, circulated and they can go back into accounts and their circulation is anonymous. This was an inspiration for a huge set of projects. He opened up a vast design space, indeed a small Cottage Industry of which this article was a part, involving how to circumvent his patent in various patents. Without having to pay him anything. But in this case for this particular article among many, hal finney had a very given why than david did. For why, it was worthwhile focusing on electronic cash, why it was to evolve it. Finneys life was like a sco score he went through brojs. Following him is going to show us three whys of digital cash that well be talking about today and how they came together toward the end of the memorial. Finney was a member of the Loose Network of advocates who called themselves the cyber punks. They were interested in the possibility of a wholly computational industry, operating outside the territorial governance entirely. T timothy may used to have this in the signature of his emails and posts along with clever jokes about crimes and lyrics from the talking heads. This, this was his plan, this was his vision, his mission, crypto anarchy. A description of a master plan that he argued was logically inevitable with the spread of strong encryption, the spread of anonymous digital cash would power new off the books, global, black market, anonymous markets, and Information Networks and Money Laundering schemes which would ultimately lead, as the end of the list implies, the collapse of nation state, the collapse of governments. And thats second why, why digital cash . Not just privacy, but adopt new currency and pull users steadily out of a relionship with their own government. Mays work was an influence on jujulian assange and the creato of the bitcoin dark market. Which is an interesting batting average for a retired intel engineer posting manifestos on unet. This why of creating digital cash created another how. If the currency was not managed however indirectly by Central Banks and produced by mints, how much currency should produced . Who decides that . How is that amount verified . How do you mint an individual token . How do you know the token are transacting is real . Like several other cypher punks, he built on others on the scene to propose a computational challenge of the governing mechanism. And i hasten to add finneyy was not alone in this. And part of a historians job, they were collaborating. He envisioned building on other peoples work, a unit of verifiable work that the computer would have to do to produce a new token, a proof of work whose cost could regulate money and a mechanism to replace the system of human decision directed Central Banks, and also, i know, like email address, provocative. The technological roots of this project, this is finneys look, he made his own logo. This is finneyeys design for reusable works, the prototype currency part of what would govern the production of new money was the Computers Work it would have to be used and verified by other people, the technological roots of this is how to deal with email spam, the challenge for creating something that was effectively free and prevent a flood of worthles per. But for many, the Cultural Roots had less to do with reinventing postage than with reinventing gold. This is the third why, based on a complex set of political commitmentnts to a currency backed by Precious Metals. I find this slide very amusing and then i reaealize that peopl may not recognize, this is goldfinger from the james bond movepointing to fort knox as part of his plan to make gold radioactive. The obsession of gold is going to chararacterize this part of y talk. This is the third why of the cash, currency backed by Precious Metals. The desire, however paradoxical it may seem to combine the ease and liquidity of online commerce and actions with a particular physical constraints of gold, its scarcity, the challenge of its acquisition. The way it functions more of a store of value and collateral and asset class and its deflationary character, its hoardability. And i have to say what h. G. Wells called its magnificent stupid honesty. They put the money supply outside the control of government regulations and central banking. This version of the digital cash project drew on the work of the real pioneers of online payments. A subculture of socalled dgcs or digital gold currenencies. Years before paypal, companies were doing massive transaction volume and ownership takes in grains and grams of gold and silver stored in facilities from london in antwerp, to idaho and duba this particular artifact is from the Liberty Dollar silver system out of a bank we hasten to add, whichch was attempt to o create their own circulatable notes, which were not notes as such instead ownership receipts of precious volume metal physically stored on pallets in in idaho and they wouldalso, as soon as they were able to isissue paper receipts, issued digital receipts and come up with a ledger, to be paid in the tokesens. Is cash project drew on the work im sorry, i already said that. These had the ideology, the anonymity, the network ease of use and the scarcity of Precious Metals. And they were fragile, brittle and required a tremendous amount of trust on the part of thei in one elses spread sheet. They were sitting on a pallet in a warehouse which you likely never saw with your holdings stored on somebody elses server. When someone dropped a dime on the operation, and there were silver notes and circulation, everyones assets got tagged and bagged and thrown in the van for eventually trial. Your whole network could be distributed, but the gold wasnt and neither was the ledger. All of your assets walked out the door with the u. S. Marshals. Of course, the reason why the quality on these materials is so bad, its the best source for archives on the Digital Silver currency scheme in idaho is the fbi. All of this stuff is left over from all of the documents released publicly. Which provokes another how. How could you where the owners and transactors were. Finney was sympathetic to the gold, but not the means. Digital gold currencies. Money should be about bits not he argued. Of particular important for peoples digital cas process wasnt just the scarcity of gold and this they understood, but the ways that gold could be known and verified. The particular cultures of knowledge that gold produced. The ways it could be physilly weighed as well assayed, accounted for. If you g go back into the archival digital gold currencies, its like going back into the archives of archivists, maintained sheets that tell how a bar was created, every single time it was tested and every single shelf it sat on in every country, in every context. Every te its cabinet was opened. Every time someone physically handled it. It should maybe ring a bell. And the in the sipher punks alike, proposed a digital cash as a verifiable collectivive lo for the volume of money. Something that allows them to measure and snapsho the overall shape and quantity of their money in the world in the way that they could more or less do for Precious Metals. I started going to libertarian events in New Hampshire in the mid 20 teens as i was working on this book because they were the only places i could find where casual daytoday transactns were being constructedn cryptocurrency and Precious Metals. Im sure many of you can already guess. The reason why you can buy ththings for specific values of dated coins, is because of the changing volume of Precious Metals in u. S. Coinage over time. Right . So basically, the metallic content of silver half dollars, of quarters, of dimes, changed on the dates that they note. Theres a whole kind of New Hampshire libertarian hobby which is just to get rolls and rolls of quarters and dimes from the banks and hang out in your house at night going through them with a bright lamp looking for the charactistic sparkle in the roll that helps you identifify the pre1964 quarters and returning the rest and cycling through the banks own ventory this way. Youd go to buy socks or chili or what have you at a libertarian enclave event and the transactions could be conducted by smart phone in bitcoin or a doe coin when that was a thing or transacting silver. There was a specific kind of question how is it that people like one thing le the other . And its because of the way in which both of them could theoretically could be known. The way in which one minter said to me, why he got interested in silver, as money, he looked at me and said silver is silver and the weight is the weight. Theres a knowability. The fourth and last why of making digital cash and in some ways the strangest, most oddly beautiful, but closely connected to the previous three begins in this magazine, which is the same issue where finney was explaining david chalms system of cash. The counter of transhumanist thought. He was on the margins of gold currency and libertarian worl an extropian was at the end of thecentury. Many key people who were in the bitcoin were extropians. Most of the people who kicked the tires and helped to get the key ideas for it. The etropians were looking at a future of l limitless abundance on a cosmicscale. For time, space, life austrian reeconomics, they believed the path to abundance la through technological interno evaluation accelerated by markets, so free that markets barely do them justice. This is one of many mock currencies, denominated in the austrian economist. Extraordinary figure, much to our des detriment. This is filled with in jokes that they felt they would be a part of. The first thing they thought had to be created was the ultra free markets for the radical breakthroughs was the money itself. New forms of future oriented currency would be their vehicles out of the earths gravity well. They wanted to build currencies that bet on the future being rich beyond measure from which they could profit today and indeed, many of the key extropian experiences are noted for how experimental they were. You could bet on how wildly successfulul you and the rest o your friends on this mailing list were going to be. Idea coupons of which i believe i may have hold one of the only remain idea coupons, i intend to claim, which were notes designed to mature if and only if a particular prediction came to pass. So could you effectively buy into that prediction like a kick starter, only if a computer of a number of terra flops, or successful brain reanimation. And made one other bet on tt future of limitless abundance. It takes the melancholy sting they were going to lay the groundwork for post human immortalityy and die before it panned out and prepared to have them cryonically frozen which present add problem for digital cash. The highlighted name there was an entrepreneur and professional techno optimist in the 1970s and 80s, notable for other stunts like reading the entire Space Shuttle budget into the congressional record, claiaiming that the space shutte was privately on the value of the market. He started a private space Flight Company and online marketplace, both of them 20 years ahead of their time, give or take. Theres a really fascinating book to be written about him, an interesting character who basically lived in advance of his own context. And thearketplace system, the American Information Exchange was effectively a versi of the entire internet he was trying to build from scratch by himself in the ear 1980s. Its a singularly bizarre project. And by the late 1980s, phil was dying of pancreatic cancer and preparing to have himself frozen. One of the issues that he discussed with timothy may, the cypher punkut a friend of his, was how to create money, an asset class, secured from taxation or seizure, availalable to phils password when he was reanimated and indeed they talked about how the password would be a threshold, right . It would mean your brain wou have to be able to be reconstructed with so much accuracy that the password would be able to be recalled from it to unlock your assets, a kind of reverse from being able to bring its own creator back from the dead. This is from his this is from the log of people being frozen, deanimation date is their term up there, which is still maintained and which in self, assuming anyone wants to do this, writing some kind of experimental novel or nonfiction studies, an essay about everyone who is currently on i would be a really amazing snapshot of a particular corner of the 20th century. So the need to freeze though meant that the kinds of currencies that they were envisioning, needed t 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 existe perhaps impossible. And tension that plays out in much digital cash. Im fascinated by this picture, its part of the deanimation process. I wonder what the woman over on the left is thinking as she gazes down. This is a room of viewers in which a number of key people from the history of digital cash are all currently stored. These are the casks theyre frozen in scottsdale, arizonona what is this room as they look at it than a room full of time mamachines. Theyre awaiting the condion of speculative innovation that could produce the technology to repair the machines and bring their occupants out in the future that theyanted to reach and this is the fourth why of digital cash as it ended up being produced after the its down turn security, and thinking practically, those of how know people in the world speculating on cryptocurrencies may recognize this exact paradox of people who in the same breath can promise you something thats more solid than any other asssset could possibly be, as real as mass as a phrase that i hear a lot which as a historian of mathematics, oh, as real as math, which is simultaneously also 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 deep freeze casks include hal finney. Id like to close here with this tweet, this is finney again. He was a correspondent of nakomoto. He received technical and critical feedback on the first draft of new system. Indeed, aside from nakamoto, finney could be construed as probably the most important person in the early days of bitcoin. Even was he worked on it, he was sicker and sicker, and they would sell theirs for the als. And money is almost always about the future. And i think one of the deep questions that we should think about is to quotete john maynar keane, in the long run, were all dead, right . The futur is where we go to be archaic and knock nis anachronist anachronistics, and one of the things that the project can give to us, before we get to q a, reflect on currencies that hold the future, ways of thinking about the future and ways of thinking about what the future holds for us. If therere are ways that we can also try to think about what kinds of futures we would like to live in, and how money can builild toward those promises, how forms of currency can actually provide avenues into a Better Future tn the one were likely to get. Thank you very much for your attention. [applaus [applause] it ended on a super bleak note. But im in a bleak mood, its a bleak time. Now. Yes. [inaudible] so were going to have a mic for the questions for the benefit of americas wonderful television system, cspan. Yes. Oh, yeah, i should have actually yes, yeah, were going to be on cspan book talk, which is litelly one of my favoritee things in the world. Yes. Its going to be us and congressional testimony. And impeachment hearings. Good company. Its drawing a line, and one of the things i was thinking about when you read the libertarian gatherings in New Hampshire and how there are only specific claims, i guess specific claims had certain values. Theres it reminded me, although its entirely different reasons, when you go to certain countries they will only accept like american dollars. Yes. Or only 20 bills of certain years and prior to 20099 or something is worthless, basically. Like i think sudan is one of those countries where if you go there with 20s that are 2009 and prior, its essentlly not accepted. I dont know, i guess my question is you have any comments on that or theres like this weird kind of line between power and if you dont have power and the different uses of money and different values you p place on that. No, thats a wonderful question. I think theres two dimensions to this question that are also especially interesting to think about in terms of how we talk about things like crcryptocurrency. The first is the idea of fungability. Money is fungable, they can exchange for one another. But in practice thats not the case. Money is actually highly particular, and its highly particular both in terms of the values that are given to different monetary objects, whether thats people who are much more obsessed with the spot value of metal than with the face value of coins. Or with people who are operating in a context where for statewide reasons, federal reasons, particular bills for a particular period when thehe ne Security Technology was introduced cannot be trusted. Like whole economies got flooded with extremely good fake notes, which were u. S. Notes, which were last i heard, most likely printed using old equipment from east germany that got sold off and ended up in north korea and libya. But where they had like fantastic facililities for producing really beautiful notes. And those effectively killed off the ability of certain classes of dollars from before a particular period to circulate. And so, those dollars really arent fungable, they actually exist in different regimes of knowledge and to be able to understand and verify that something is likely or not. But eve more than that, and i think this kind much goes more into questions of power and the future, as we learn bh from wonderful work by people like vivi viviana zeletser. She has written at incredible lengths and depth of the question. Youll get 20 by chance from someone. Oh, this is my fun 20. I get to spend this on anything because i didnt like earn it, you know . The process called earmarking which seems like a trivial thing that we all engage in in ordinary life except for the fact that it canan have real impact how we do things like structure our finances, how we think about putting money away from the future versus spending money now. How we think about giving money to different people for what it means to receive money, allowances, pin money, walk away money. The ststash and i cant swear because were on television, but the stash of fu money. We go live now to the floor of the u. S. Senate and members taking up judicial nominations for District Courts of alabama and oklahoma. This is live covage of the senate on cspan2. The chaplain let us pray. Heavenly father, today restore in our lawmakers faith in the ultimate triumph of