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"...the elements of cyberpunk have dissolved into the whole SF genre, so it’s hard to find anyone writing who doesn’t owe serious debts to Gibson and his crew."
- Richard Morgan
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| 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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More Ideas
and Technology from Heavy Weather
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and Technology by Bruce Sterling
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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
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
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The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
