Digital Currency: ten years before Bitcoin, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon | Hacker News Reader

Digital Currency: ten years before Bitcoin, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon

laurelzuckerman.com

31 pointssaurabh24 comments

Very different concept: the digital currency in Cryptonomicon was centralized, to be issued by a bank or bank-like institution that owned massive gold reserves and could thus be trusted. The anonymity could be guaranteed because the bank would operate in national state that guaranteed anonymity by law (a so-called data haven).

That was one bit of Cryptonomicon that bothered me - the Sultan simply decided one day to guarantee anonymity, but he was an absolute monarch so he could just as easily decide one day to remove anonymity.

[Mind you, that is a minor niggle - Cryptonomicon is one of my favourite novels]

I agree it is totally unrealistic; no small country could resist the international pressure that would generate

anarky - your comment is showing up as dead, which is a shame since it was interesting

> And 5 years before Cryptonomicon there was Tim May's Cyphernomicon (which obviously inspired the title and theme of Stephenson's book).

> In 1995 there was Stephenson's short story in Wired about digital cash - "The Great Simoleon Caper".

> Of course, the protagonists of Atlas Shrugged had renounced paper money and started using privately minted gold coins from Midas Mulligan's Bank way back in 1957.

Honestly, Cryptonomicon is probably my favourite novel. A bit hard going the first read through, but it's immensely re-readable.

Anathem makes Cryptonomicon look easy. I'm literally working my way through it right now. Stephenson is one of my favorites, so it's worth it.

Try The Baroque Cycle. I rarely use the word epic, but it is a fitting descriptor for that series.

And 5 years before Cryptonomicon there was Tim May's Cyphernomicon (which obviously inspired the title and theme of Stephenson's book).

In 1995 there was Stephenson's short story in Wired about digital cash - "The Great Simoleon Caper".

Of course, the protagonists of Atlas Shrugged had renounced paper money and started using privately minted gold coins from Midas Mulligan's Bank way back in 1957.

Please don't just copy & paste comments from hell-banned users and pass them off as your own. They may have been hell-banned for a reason, but this is still unacceptable style.

qengho is probably anarky creating a new account and starting again.

Since anarky was hell banned after a single innocuous comment (unless there are things that were so awful they got deleted) it seems fair enough.

> And 5 years before Cryptonomicon there was Tim May's Cyphernomicon (which obviously inspired the title and theme of Stephenson's book).

Actually, no, according to Stephenson. From the appendix of my copy of Cryptonomicon:

"It has been pointed out that the word "Cryptonomicon" bears obvious similarities to "Cyphernomicon," which is the title of a Cyperpunk FAQ document by Tim May. This leads to the question: am I committing some form of plagiarism, or rendering homage, or what? The answer, strangely enough, is niether. I was completely unaware of the existence of Tim May's Cyphernomicon at the time I came up with "Cryptonomicon."

I read that too, and I don't want to doubt Stephenson's word, but it's very hard to believe that he hadn't run across Cyphernomicon or the Cypherpunks (hell, they were on the cover of Wired Issue #1.02) in researching crypto for Cryptonomicon. Maybe he forgot he did but the term stuck in his subconscious. Or maybe he really didn't do even basic research before coming up with the name?

PS. Yes, I am the commenter previously known as anarky. No idea why that account got banned after a single comment.

Walter Jon Williams' "Hardwired", 1986. Protagonist had billions of dollars on a chip that he had implanted in his body for safekeeping. I thought "that will never work." He also had people jacked in to the stock market, getting 10-second loans to trade with. I thought that would happen one day, but we just have algorithms doing that for us.

I basically only use digital currency right now, and it's just your normal Euros. I get paid by the company through internet banking and it gets deposited to my bank account. I pretty much only check my bank information online. When I pay (99% of the time) with my debit card, the card reader at the store connects through 3G to the banks server to verify the transaction. I'll go weeks without even touching paper money / coins. I can't imagine how to make it more digital than that and this is what basically everyone in Finland has done for 5+ years

The difference here is that the Euros you're working with can't be held digitally as actual stored value. You can't carry them with you, and they must at all times be tied to an identity. With true digital currency, you're not tied to someone else's server for transactions. You can make the exchange in person, no trusted third party required. Your Euros require a trusted bank to hold your Euros, and a trusted country issuing them.

There have been schemes with cards that you can load digital currency to and off of, that to my understanding remove the server from the transaction. They still don't let you give ¤5 to your kid, but they're a step in that direction. It's just that no one wanted them.

I'm not certain that they didn't need servers, I merely believe so.

Just a small clarification, you can't carry bitcoins with you either.

Bitcoins are not little pieces of information you can hold on a thumb drive, but an agreement by the network that a certain balance belongs to some address.

You are absolutely tied to a server for transactions, and there is a trusted third party required. That third party is the bitcoin network itself. It is impossible to make a bitcoin transaction while offline because making a transaction means updating the state of the network, not merely giving somebody information.

Not the same situation in the south, where your digital balance can receive a 'haircut' (btw why do we call it 'haircut', have you ever cut off 40% of your body in the barbershop?)

Print money is a serious option of safety for many people.

Paper moneys have received haircuts too. To deduct from a balance, all you need is someone with read and write access to said balance, be it physical or virtual.

Ten years before bitcoin, we had e-gold. And it was good. And now the government owns it anyway.

Though in Cryptonomicon the currency was backed by hidden Japanese and Nazi gold.

Pecunia non olet, meus amicus.

Well I didn't mean it in that sense.

Twenty years before Bitcoin, David Chaum was showing us how to make provably secure digital cash protocols.

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