[thinknubpad]

There was a reasonably punk book called Cryptonomicon which came out in the 1999. Spoiler alert: it follows a group of people loosely based on real figures who worked on cryptography in WWII, and their fictional descendants' quest to eventually create a cryptocurrency.

Thing is, the book's cryptocurrency had two important features:

* It was backed by real assets (recovered WWII gold bars).

* It did not insist on radical decentralization as a hedge against meddling by institutional powers. Instead, the currency was headquartered in an oil-rich nation which was too economically important to be invaded, and which knew that it would eventually need an alternative to oil.

The point is, cyberpunk is not the same thing as anarchy. Blockchains and defi are concepts which are being pushed by corpos. The sudden deregulation gives them a quick, easy, and arguably legal way to participate in illicit markets while bilking money out of suckers.

[notahacker]

Also, despite obviously sympathising with the cryptography nerds minting their own currency and going on a side quest for lost gold, Stephenson sets up his ending by having another key character rant about the ills of stored wealth versus people getting up to do stuff every day...

[rnk]

That book so brilliantly covered the pre-Satoshi crypto world. I love that book, which has so many interesting stories about the history of computers and the impact of technology. I always thought there should be more consideration of whether that book's author, Neal Stephenson, could have been involved in the Satoshi saga.

[qzw]

I’m a big fan of his work, but now that you mention it, the story of cryptocurrency in our timeline does have a Stephensonesque quality to it: brilliant world building at the start, a wild ride in the middle, and a messy and controversial ending at the finish.