Digital cash

This article examines the ideological roots of cryptocurrencies through the exploration of the cypherpunk virtual community’s mailing list. Gathered around a hard core of Californian hackers, the cypherpunks sketched out the first digital cash projects aimed at providing individuals with anonymous, untraceable and unfalsifiable means of online transaction, which gave birth to cryptocurrencies. Digital cash, part of a vast project of social reform with utopian overtones and informed by radical currents of libertarian political economy, was for its instigators the herald of a new era, that of’crypto-anarchy’. Equating online social and economic interactions indiscriminately with a form of individual freedom of expression over which states and large corporations could no longer exercise any control, cyberpunks invented cryptographic protocols to actualise their vision – a vision that is now tainted by the deployment of these innovations in the industrial New World of digital capitalism.