What Bitcoin Has To Do With The Dream Of Cryonics

I certainly do. That was a great episode. Yeah, I love that episode, and in part because you know, I feel like all this you know, talk about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies these days, and really over the last couple of years, well, a lot of the conversation is very forward looking, people trying to figure out where it's going to go next, what the technology could be used for, how big things

could get. I find it very fruitful to actually look backwards and before even figuring out where it's going to go next, trying to think about where it came from and some of the problems that the early people in

alved into space we're trying to solve. Oh. Absolutely, And I think whenever you're talking about new technologies, there's obviously, for for very clear reasons, a tendency to focus on what's happening next and the future, and just trying to refocus a little bit of attention on the problems of the past is really useful and and often you know, there there's a reason that things have happened um the way they did in the past, and it tells you

something instructive about the future as well. Right, So bitcoin has basically been around ten years, and you know, it's been obviously extraordinary run. But the people who are involved, we don't really know who exactly invented bitcoin. Obviously there's a pseudonymous creator, but people were working on bitcoin like problems for years before bitcoin came, about how to develop sort of digital internet money in one way or another.

David Chaum was one of them. Anyway, part of the reason we booked David is I was inspired from having read a book earlier in the year about this entire prehistory and I thought it was so fascinating. And today I'm excited because we're going to be talking to the author of the book, and it's really all about the long period leading up to bitcoin, the different ways people are working on it. I must admit I haven't been

able to read the entire book. I'm still in my Korean reading phase and I'm now reading a very long history of the Korean War, but I have skimmed it. It looks really interesting and I think one of the things that comes through is that the idea of cryptocurrencies has always been sort of inextricably linked to a particular system of either values or sort of hopes and dreams

for the future. Yeah, that's exactly right. So on the one hand, it's kind of a technological breakthrough, and the technology is important, but really it's about values in politics and morals and sort of the relationship that we have with big technology companies or big government things like that. And so, without further ado, I want to bring in our guests. We're going to be speaking with Finn Brunton.

He has an n y U professor and the author of the newly released book Digital Cash, The Unknown History of the Anarchists, utopians, and Technologists who created Cryptocurrency. Fascinating book. Very excited to have the author, Finn Brunton. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So I just want to say I loved this book and I I'm trying to get as many people to read it, and I've tweeted about it a few times and advocate I think it's going to be one of

the reads of the year. But I'm curious why you wrote the book. How did you get started on trying to really uncover the uh the prehistory of digital currency.

I was originally trained as a historian of science and technology, and one of the things that you learn when you work on that subject is how much the technologies around us, the things that made our built world, the things we use every day, both are there because of what they can do, but also because of what they can mean, often because of the hopes and promises and fears and

visions and histories that are wrapped up in them. So with that in mind, years ago, I was working on a project about spam and I noticed how spammers were starting to adopt a lot of new, weird currencies that I had never heard of before. Um this is even in the pre bitcoin days. But they were looking at currencies that were things like digital gold, currencies in the nine nine, other ways to move money around that could protect them from the eyes of the law and various

other forms of reprisal. And I just started to feel like there's something really rich here. And as soon as Bitcoin appeared, it all jelled for me, like this is something where we can see in real time in the present, the evolution of a new set of technology of gees both in terms of what they can do, but also in terms of all of the stories, the visions, the

fantasies that are wrapped up in them. So then you mentioned the notion that we often have values or hopes attached to technology, But I'm wondering when it comes to cryptocurrency or digital cash in particular, it feels like, because we're talking about money, which traditionally has been wrapped up in you know, power and government and various other forms of authority, it feels like with money there there's even more values or hopes or dreams pin to this particular project.

Is that what you learned? Oh? Absolutely, Yeah, money is always meaningful and it's always a relationship right in a way that is. Yes, it's radically distinct from a lot of other kinds of technologies, and I love to think of money as being you know, different scholars of money have come up with wonderful ways to try to describe what it is. Some people call it like, you know, a social micro technology, or a kind of diffused community powers, like an enormous variety of different ways to try to

get at what this thing is. But the heart of it, the essence of it, was defined for me by Himan Minsky, the wonderful monetary economist, who said, um that anyone can make money, like literally anyone can make money. The challenges to get other people to accept it, and the process of getting money accepted, of getting money to pass, that's the process that's kind of the moment where you see this thing really emerges, something that is like uniquely bound

into our social and political structures. So whether that's in the form of a government being able to specify as for example, the US dollar does this is legal tender for all debts, public and private, meaning that you know, if you owe me a debt, like you can't pay it back in detergent you know, or euros or whatever like I can. I can demand dollars in exactly the same way that the government can do man payment of taxes in dollars, and that becomes a way of establishing

not just the value of money, but also money. The US dollar in this case as an act of allegiance, as something where we accepted and pass it by and large completely unconsciously because of a particular territorial political allegiance that we have, and the same is true of the many, many other diverse forms of money that flourish and exist

around the world today and also back through history. These are things that we accept because we believe that in the future they will be accepted from us, we will be able to pass them on in turn, and perhaps are passing them on is going to be because we want to participate in some specific community, as with a

local currency. Perhaps it's because it reflects our bonds with a larger kinship group, as with a lot of not necessarily currencies alone, but a lot of different kinds of money that we see that have to do with exchanges within a particular tribe, within a particular culture, within a particular family, or even things that we accept because we think they will be worth something in the future because something bad is going to happen, because they will be

worth more because of a crisis. I love that you brought in that Minsky quote because that's always been one of my favorites. So the book, I mean, not surprisingly, the people who are working on this problem or digital currency or new forms of money and the pre Bitcoin era people came at it from all different kinds of backgrounds,

as you really nicely portray in your book. Obviously, there's anarchists or people who may be doing something that's illegal, like spammers trying to figure out a way to skirt banking regulations, or sort of Austrian economics types who hated

the FED and wanted some sound money. Whatever it is, I have to say, and I the most surprising thing to me in the book, which I had no realization before, and I've you know, I've read a fair amount about cryptocurrencies, was the connection between queen cryptocurrencies and extropians or people who were really into like cryogenics and life extension. I would never have made that connection before, but it was probably one of the most fascinating revelations. Let's talk a

little bit about that. Who were the extropians and why were they interested in this uh in digital currency back then? Yeah, they were absolutely the fine for me and working on this project. There are a lot of things I discovered, but they took the cake partially because they were, you know, just about as as visionaries it's possible to be, in terms of the scale of their hopes and aspirations that

they were putting into working on digital cash. So the extropians were a fairly small network of kind of a loose mix of of philosophers, technologists of various kinds, you know, engineers, computer scientists, software developers, um, you know Hi fi readers, and some interested fellow travelers who are all kind of mixed together, mostly in the Bay Area, but with kind of scattered scattered others around the country and around the world.

And two crucial things to know about the Estropians going in is that they overlapped incredibly like closely with the cipher punk movement that had preceded them, which is somewhat more widely known, the community of again mostly software developers and computer scientists who wanted to bring strong encryption to the civilian world and start building new technologies on top

of that, like censorship resistant, privacy, preserving digital money. But the Estropians also overlapped very very tightly with a lot of the community around the initial appearance of bitcoin. A lot of the same people who are part of the Estropian movement are on that mailing list. One of them runs the mailing list on which the Bitcoin white paper appears.

A lot of them are in the very earliest days of sort of kicking the Bitcoin project around and testing out the initial code um and a number of them have even been proposed as candidates for the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. So when you see that set of connections, you start to think, who are these people? Who is this movement? And the essence of the Extropian movement, as their name would suggest, is they are the anti entropy movement.

They want to use technological innovation and scientific discovery to produce a future of radical abundance um. They have the set of key tenants which really kind of captures that the spirit of the movement back in the eighties and nineties boundless expansion, dynamic optimism, self transformation, intelligent technology, and

spontaneous order. And when you combine all of those different aspects together, what you get is a story about the use of new forms of technology that will be able to spontaneously generate new ways to live, new sources of prosperity, energy, time,

and space, that will create new forms of intelligence. They're especially interested in these kinds of singularity style breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that will then be able to produce a future in which we can overcome a lot of the limits of the human condition and expand out into space and create some kind of radically new order of being so, now you ask, like, how does money have to do

with this? And the marvelous answer is that for them, digital cash was not just a way to you know, protect the value of their assets from their fears for the future for instance, even though that does play into it a little bit, but also a way to produce new kinds of markets and new forms of economic incentives for innovation that will so accelerate the progress of technology that it will be able to lead to this series of breakthroughs that will make them effectively immortal, that will

that will create the society that they envision in which they will be able to live forever. So how's that for an economic agenda? So, Finn can you walk us through that that theory a little bit, because I guess when it comes to incentivizing innovation in cryonics, a lot of people would say, well, why not just use existing normal money. Why do you need a particular form of

digital or cryptocurrency. That's a really excellent question, actually, and part of the answer has to do with with a deeper part of the heritage of cryptocurrencies, which we still see having a strong influence, especially over early form like the early stages of bitcoin, which is Austrian economics, um,

the sort of Austrian school of economic theory. The Estropians did something really unique in some ways, which is that they fused the sort of Austrian economic theories, especially the work of Friedrich Hyak, with a whole kind of for lack of a better way of describing a very Californian, very science fiction influenced sensibility to say that we want to produce a future that is not shaped by the existing ways that money moves around, because those are too

slow and too limited in terms of how, for example, investment vehicles work, in terms of how those things are reviewed, um, in terms of how people can accumulate assets they could put towards, for example, Extropian goals that they could use to fund, you know, nanotechnology and singularity experiments and so on.

They say, to produce the kind of spontaneous technological order that we want to produce, to produce the society of innovation, we want to adopt the model that High develops, which is based on the idea of proliferating other kinds of currencies, of essentially proliferating a free banking system in which new kinds of technologies can generate their own banks, their own transaction platforms, their own kinds of money, and produce a sort of highly chaotic economic brew which will be able

to break the deadlock of how economic prosperity and funding

are normally produced. And I'm not necessarily when we say all these things, not as like advocating for this as a theory that I think holds water, but to sort of explain part of their their ethos and by kind of breaking the normal ways that funding is allocated for innovation, that major firms and institutions and governments and courage technological invention, they will be able to create something that we could think of as like wildcat innovation in the spirit of

wildcat banking, right, like you know, unchartered banks that exist outside the normal apparatus of banking, that are very well suited to functioning in terms of things like black markets, gray markets, intellectual piracy, you know, all kinds of overseas economic systems which from their perspective, from the extropian perspective, all feed into being able to fund and generate and germanate new technologies and new dis discoveries that would be

otherwise being produced too slowly if they were produced at all. So, just on that note, it feels like, so cryptocurrency is supposed to be this agent of extreme change, you know, sort of fostering new types of systems that thereby foster new technology. But at the same time, presumably people who are willing to freeze their own bodies in order to wake up in the future, they want their digital investments to also be a store of value. Right, You're talking

about a really long term investment horizon. So how are they squaring, to put it mildly, um, how are they squaring the notion of cryptocurrency as an agent of radical change and the notion that it's also supposed to be

a you know, fairly boring store of value. That really cuts to the heart of the challenge that the extropians faced and of the kind of trade offs that were embedded in a lot of these very early experiments with digital cash, um, including the trade off that we can see being made on one side very strongly when we get to bitcoin. Right. So, the way we tried to to walk that line was by producing a currency that would be able to be extremely reliable as a store

of value. UM. And you might ask, obviously, like on what grounds could that be reliable. But one of the sort of crucial ideas, we will make this reliable by having something like a Ledger system, by having some kind of mechanism whereby everyone that holds the currency can collectively agree on how much of it is going to be produced, on how much of it is going to be available, and that will make it so that you can hold these assets while you are you know, technically dead or

d animated in metabolic coma as they put it. You can hold these assets and know that everyone else who holds them is going to be working with you to keep their value over the long term in a way that will save you from having to sort of worry about the idea that some other agenda for example, you know, quantitative easing or you know, pump criming or whatever, is going to dramatically change the value of this this money

that you have access to. But at the same time, you also want this money to have that kind of um wild boom and bust capacity to be able to generate the sorts of frenzies of investment that they think are are most likely to be able to generate these sorts of wild technological breakthroughs. So the they never quite resolve that dichotomy, and you can see them developing different

kinds of money that work in both ways. From the people who are trying to develop like very very stable, solid investment structures like dynastic trusts that would be able to hold and invest capital during your sort of posthumous period um that would be able to eventually fund your revival, and the people we're trying to generate these very unusual experimental currencies that would be much more productive of wild

and disruptive including economically disruptive breakthroughs. And a really interesting example of the latter kind of thing is an idea that the Xtropians worked on a lot called idea coupons, which were essentially a currency that would be issued against the likelihood of a future event happening, which you could both use, so a future event on the level of like this number of people living on Mars by such and such a date, or a computer of the following

like sort of metrics being in existence by such and such a date, which you could use to both fund that but also transform it into kind of an investment mechanism for things that you otherwise will not easily be able to find a way to invest in that you

want to see exist. So when we actually see bitcoin come into being, one of the interesting choices that we see being made with that is that the decision has been made to shift over to the first aspect of what they want that currency to be, something that is notionally all about solidity, something that is all about being an extremely reliable, deflationary store of value, rather than something that's going to produce this kind of frenzy of innovation

which will hopefully bring these changes about. What I really love about this is that if you think about just sort of traditional finance, or even just traditional money, this idea of porting value from time a to some unspecified point in the future, maybe a year from now, maybe when you retire in thirty years. Already money is currently exists to sort of fulfill this time travel function that we're talking about, So how do you preserve purchasing power

from a you know, one point to another point. Currency itself is designed to hold value that you know, it obviously leaks over time, investments, other structures. So what essentially they're doing is trying to solve the problem that finance currently solved, but just over much extreme time horizon. So you know, you might go into a cryogenically preserved chamber and you might not wake up for a thousand years, because nobody knows when the technology will come to unthought people.

So in a way, and you know, there's a pretty good chance that over a thousand years, your U S Dollar bank accounts, there's a good chance that that's gone. But it's essentially a way to just sort of radically alter the time horizons or the time scales that money and finance is already used for. Oh yeah, absolutely, And that's part of what is so kind of fascinating about it for me and I hope for for people at large, is this is like a thought experiment, except that people

are actually trying to carry it out in practice. For how you think about how money is embedded in time, right, So, just as you say, like whether we're talking about like depreciation schedules or like the discount rate, or the way that we like allocate money in our personal lives into college funds and four oh one case and yeah, all that stuff, we're always you know, sort of juggling and

balancing different kinds of monetary time against each other. So here's a group who's thinking about this in the real long term, and it was also trying to understand the ways that money will transform in over time in relation to technological disruption. And they're doing that not just as like you know, venture capitalists trying to kind of project different disruptive transformations into the future, but also as people who are trying to understand its consequences for their own lives.

How will what money is be altered by these various new technologies that they're envisioning. How can they, as it were, a bank on that to create these particular kinds of currency that will be able to either fund those dramatic transformations that will bring them back from the dead or create the kinds of money that will enable their prosperity when they are brought back from the dead. So, finn

I wanted to pick up on this point. Actually, and I'm about to utter a sentence that I never thought I would utter on odd lots, But you know, cryonics. Cryonics is predicated on technology getting better. Right, Like, no one at the moment is able to revive a body that's been put in deep freeze. So you're making a bet that scientists will at some point figure that out and be able to bring you back from the dead. So why is there not a simultaneous belief that money

will also get better and change. Why is there a belief that the digital money system that's invented now will

endure for hundreds and hundreds of years. That's a really profound question, I think, because it also speaks to some of the and I don't mean to be too critical, like I really found this such a marvelous community to work on, but to some of the blind spots in the Extropian model, and some of the blind spots that we might be able to discern more generally in how we think about economics and money in the twenty first century.

Because absolutely, like what cryonics is in essence, what what one of those doers, those vats that hold the you know, frozen human heads and them really is is a kind of broken time machine, right with the expectation that the future will be able to produce the engineers who will get the time machine fixed so that your intelligence can step out of it at some point, you know, a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, what

have you. However, there are two aspects of this idea that are not necessarily clear until you've kind of gotten deep into this literature that may explain this paradox that you've identified. The first aspect is that for a lot of the Estropians, especially in the mid ninety nineties, you know, as we start saying kind of seeing the ramp up to the great bubble of excitement around the dot com world, they thought that this was going to happen in the

very near term. You know, like the reason for going into cryonic deep freeze was not to be preserved for a thousand years, but just to gap your own death to be preserved for like thirty years, you know, to not have the horrible irony of laying the groundwork to be the last generation that dies, you know, to just

kind of leap frog that brief interval. So in that respect, in that kind of um tremendously foreshortened techno optimism, you can see part of this, right, this idea that like, well, presumably the any system as we know will more or lesbian existence on like say a twenty five year or

thirty year time horizon. But there's also a deeper aspect to this, which is that even if you set aside the conviction that our monetary technology is going to stay this way for a very long time, right that, Like, if you put your your cash into cryptocurrencies or into various other sort of early Estropian ideas, then that is now going to remain the state of the art, you know, for the centuries to come. But an even larger question, which is whether or not this sort of model of

money that we're working with is going to persist. Like if you think about chronics on you know, a thousand year time horizon, then you start to think, like how many of us, Like if I showed up, you know, to try to like buy a house with let's say, like a letter of mark that I received from a monarch thousand years ago, that's probably not going to get

me anywhere. You know, if we look back at the classes of money that we're around, even before the Civil War in the United States, even before the development of the kind of territorial currency structure that we're now used to,

it was radically different. So I think this reflects a weird mix and an interesting makes to think about in the cryptocurrency world of simultaneously being incredibly far sighted, right, like trying to think about the future of humans as technological creatures over the coming decades, the centuries, even the millennia, and also incredibly shortsighted, incredibly predicated on the idea that the way that we think about how money works and the way that we think about how economics works is

going to stay more or less exactly the same for all of that time. And I think that that paradox is something that you can see even now in the way that people talk about and try to figure out what to do with cryptocurrency. I love this conversation uh so much. I'm there's so many facets we could explore that we only have just a little bit of time left. Oh before I forgot. I love that characterization of a cryonics machine or whatever it is as a broken time machine.

I remember you used that term in your book, and that really stood out to be because basically this idea of like, all right, here's the time machine. It doesn't work yet because we don't know how to unthaw the body, but at some point someone is going to come along and fix it. I thought that was just It's perfect. Before we wrap up, though, I was just curious, um some of the names that you mentioned, you know, the overlap between the Estropians and the cipher punks, who are

some of the key individuals. I think the first person on Twitter to ever use the term bitcoin was hell Finny. Was he an extropian. He was UM and in fact he is chronically preserved. UM. He tragically passed away, uh, you know, fairly young from a l s and yeah, he's he's he's cryo preserved and he has actually I think a really good example of the kinds of characters that I discovered and working on the book, because Phiny is someone who turns up in so many different contexts,

like he's in the world of the cipher punks. He writes a wonderful description of David Chaum's digi cash, explaining the whole technology, the model, everything for extrop the journal of the Extropian Movement UM, he's on their mailing lists, and then of course in two thousand and eight he is the sort of primary correspondent for Nakamoto. He provides a lot of key suggestions about how to refine the technology. UM. He like you know, puts in a huge amount of

work on early versions of the software. UM. So he's one of the threads that really kind of ties this whole story together. Some people think he was right. Yes, yeah, there's there's a whole theory that he was Satoshi, which I don't think is is true for a bunch of

different reasons. But but he was definitely someone who is like right at the center of that of then, and it's actually really delightful, Like you can go back and and read through these archives of the mailing list where for a while Phinny's kind of the only guy who believes that bitcoin could actually be a thing. But he's also still very critical in a really you know, respectful way. But he's like looking at the software and it's great

to read knowing everything that happened to it. Afterwards, he's looking at these early technologies and being like, yeah, but I think, you know, you haven't really thought through this part, you know, Or I think you need to really pin down this number before we go ahead. None of them knew quite what they were about to unleash on the world,

I don't think. But we also can follow people like Nick Sabo, who has also been proposed as a candidate for the real identity of Nakamoto um and Ssabo is someone who likewise turns up in the cipher punk world turns up in the Estropian world, where he's making predictions about like with varying levels of confidence about future like digital cash enabled online market places back in the early

nineteen nineties. Um And then creates a model for what a new currency could look like, called bit gold, that actually involves like mechanisms with the chain of digital signatures linked together into a ledger of transactions, which is very, very kind of Bitcoin esque. We can follow people like Tim May, who by and large created key aspects of

the psypherpunk movement, developed the model of crypto anarchy. Um And was also someone who spent a lot of time hanging out in the Estropian list and was very interested in enabling various kinds of informational black markets using digital cash, one of which became a direct inspiration for the Silk Road.

So we see, like one after another, that when Bitcoin comes into being, when the cryptocurrency revolution really starts, almost everyone who is at that moment of inception has been thinking about this kind of thing for decades, and has been thinking about it for a huge variety of different utopian and political visionary reasons. Finn Brenton, this is a fascinating conversation. I can't recommend enough to people that if you're interested in this, you should go read the book

because it's just completely mind expanding and eye opening. And really appreciate you coming on outline. Thank you so much for having me. This has been a delight Thanks Ben. That was really great, Tracy. I love that conversation. I find this topic. You know, what I was thinking about the whole time is that the Extropians and the cipher punks and all the people that were involved in this, it feels like a situation in which they've willed science

fiction to some extent it's reality. Like, obviously we don't have cryonic technology fully developed yet, people can't on thought themselves. But it seems like a sort of weird example of people just sort of by sheer effort creating a new world on their own, essentially willing something that feels like science fiction into some sort of close existence and starting with money. Yeah. So I enjoyed that conversation too, and I'm actually really excited to sit down and properly read

this book at some point. The thing that I find really interesting is, you know, you rightly point out they're sort of willing a sci fi scenario into existence, but it's a sci fi scenario that they themselves are choosing to focus on. And as we alluded to in the intro,

there are all these values attached to it. And I'm sure there's a bigger debate to be had about whether or not we should be expending a lot of energy and resources and time on making sure that, you know, a select few elite individuals can be brought back to life the future, or whether we should, I don't know, be trying to incentivize a solution to a broader problem like world hunger or climate change or or something like that. There's a value judgment that has been made in focusing

on cryonics. Again, another sentence I thought. I never thought I would say in all thoughts, No, you're You're absolutely right, Tracy. It's also interesting because after I read this book, I got super interested in just sort of cryonics and people who hacked their bodies or other sort of people who

are into AI like long future stuff. And what struck me is exactly what you say, You're like, Well, there's all these other problems in the world, like global warming or poverty and so on, why are we spending so much effort on this, And what's interesting is that I think for a lot of them, it's almost impossible to worry about the stuff that most people worry about as long as death exists in the world. Like, oh, you're trying to worry about solving global warming. Meanwhile, we haven't

even solved death yet. So there's almost like this this flip. There's flip view, which is, until we solve the number one cause of suffering, which is the fact that people die, how could we worry about anything else. So it's almost like completely the reverse of how people think about these problems. Right, So I guess in some ways they are tackling the problem of human existence, so so we can congratulate them

for that. But I do also think to that point, like there is a weird sort of mix, as Finn put it, of of longsidedness and short sidedness and decisions being made to focus on particular problems and ignore other ones. So, for instance, when you talk to a lot of people who are either into cryptocurrency or cryonics or futurism of one sort or another, they're usually really down on you know,

politicians and existing authority structures. And yet They're incredibly confident that, you know, a group of independent technologists are going to be able to change the world for the better. Now. It is, uh, the the contradictions and these sort of a mix between incredibly far looking into the future vision but also very tunnel vision at the same time as I think part of what makes this whole space so interesting.

So this concludes the time travel slash Cryonics All Thoughts episode. Uh. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Why Isn't All? You could follow me on Twitter at the Stalwarts and you should definitely read the book Digital Cash from our guest today, Finn Brunton, and be sure to follow our producer on Twitter, Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson, as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levie at Francesca Today. Thanks for listening. Three year to