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"If you have a gut response to a story, you are not responding to something new ..you are really responding to a story you were told when you were six or seven…"
- Samuel R. Delany
 |
| Electronic Cash | ||
| A digital currency, like Bitcoin. |
Pretty good science fiction prediction of bitcoin.
| Of course, once these techniques were in place, they conclusively destroyed the ability of governments to control the flow of electronic funds, anywhere, anytime, for any purpose. As it happened, this process had pretty much destroyed any human control at all over the modern electronic economy. By the time people figured out that raging nonlinear anarchy was not exactly to the advantage of anyone concerned, the process was simply too far gone to stop. All workable standards of wealth had vaporized, digitized, and vanished into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thin air. Even physically tearing up the fiber optics couldn't stop it; governments that tried to just found that the whole encryption mess oozed swiftly into voice mail and even fax machines. ... Alex did not find it surprising that people like the Chinese Triads and the Corsican Black Hand were electronically minting their own cash. He simply accepted it: electronic, private cash, unbacked by any government, untraceable, completely anonymous, global in reach, lightninglike in speed, ubiquitous, fungible, and usually highly volatile. Of course, such funds didn't boldly say "Sicilian Mafia" right on the transaction screen; they usually had some stuffy official-sounding alias such as "Banco Ambrosiano ATM Euro-DigiLira," but the private currency speculators would usually have a pretty good guess as to the solvency of the issuers. |
| Technovelgy from Heavy Weather,
by Bruce Sterling. Published by Bantam in 1994 Additional resources -
|
Neal Stephenson wrote about something similar in his 1995 novel The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. He describes a "media net":
[As a result] ...financial transactions could no longer be monitored by governments,
Compare to whuffie, a computer-mediated reputation-based currency from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow, published by Tor in 2003. See also Sterling's discussion of bugged money from Distraction (1998). In The Age of the pussyfoot (1965), Poul Anderson provides an early description of financial transactions for everyone that are entirely mediated by computer - cellphone credit cards.
...designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security so that people could use it to transfer money.
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from Heavy Weather
More Ideas
and Technology by Bruce Sterling
Tech news articles related to Heavy Weather
Tech news articles related to works by Bruce Sterling
Electronic Cash-related
news articles:
- Bitcoin Surges Again, To $7,000
- Tether Cryptocurrency Flow Rate US$190Bn Per Day
| 'Spikeless' Brand Swizzle Stick Detects Spiked Drinks |
| Musk Proposes Sites For Martian Cities |
| Who First Thought Of A Tin Foil Hat? |
| Robot Baristas Learn Their Trade Without Paying Royalties |
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'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
