Why Bitcoin Now: The History of Digital Currency - Ep.185

Aaron van Wirdum is the technical editor at Bitcoin Magazine. Finn Brunton is the author of “Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency.” In this episode, they tackle the history of digital currency. Topics include:
the motivations behind the earliest attempts to create digital currencies, and who was behind those attempts the Extropian philosophy and how digital currency was born out of it how the cypherpunks came together and eventually began implementing tools that would lead to the creation of digital currencies the problems faced during the development of digital money, from double-spending to privacy, centralization, and spam the development of a public key protocol and why it was so significant the characteristics of earlier forms of digital currency like e-cash, hashcash, b-money, and bit gold, as well as their differences the original purpose of proof-of-work and how it was developed Hal Finney’s essential contributions to the creation of earlier digital currencies, and later, Bitcoin previous implementations of blockchain and how Bitcoin came to reinvent and utilize it which previous digital currencies come closest to Bitcoin and who they think Satoshi Nakamoto is …
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Episode links:
Aaron Van Wirdum: https://twitter.com/AaronvanW
Finn Brunton: http://finnb.net

Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179490/digital-cash

Aaron's Bitcoin magazine series on the early days of digital currency: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/genesis-files-how-david-chaums-ecash-spawned-cypherpunk-dream
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/genesis-files-hashcash-or-how-adam-back-designed-bitcoins-motor-block
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/genesis-files-if-bitcoin-had-first-draft-wei-dais-b-money-was-it
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/genesis-files-bit-gold-szabo-was-inches-away-inventing-bitcoin

Aaron on What Bitcoin Did discussing the stories: https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/the-beginners-guide-to-bitcoin-part-3-bitcoins-pre-history-and-the-cypherpunks-with-aaron-van-wirdum

Breaker Mag Interview with Finn Brunton about his book: https://breakermag.com/new-book-reveals-cryptos-radical-origins/