In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto published a revolutionary white paper that described a simple peer-to-peer electronic cash system that would later become Bitcoin. In the decade since the launch of the digital currency, the nascent blockchain technology behind Bitcoin has been heralded as having the same radical potential as the printing press or the Internet, in particular presenting extraordinary challenges to traditional banking. Yet the paper contains no reference to existing political ideas, monetary or economic knowledge. Why?
James Bridle’s introduction situates Bitcoin within an obscure historical movement of decentralisation, powered by the ideologies of encryption, showing how blockchain is part of a wider project to redraw the maps of political possibility. The White Paper returns to Nakamoto’s canonical text as a Rosetta Stone that reveals the far-reaching implications of decentralisation, with crypto-economist Jaya Klara Brekke’s guide demonstrating how it can serve as the compass for a rapidly shifting terrain of contemporary techno-politics.
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