Author Neal Stephenson famously invented the term “Metaverse” with the publication of Snow Crash in 1992 — a year before the World Wide Web or Doom even launched. But for crypto fans, his fictional depictions of early versions of Bitcoin more than a decade before it was invented are even better reasons to celebrate his work.
In his 1995 novel The Diamond Age he described an anonymous peer-to-peer communication system that could transfer money. A short story he published in TIME that same year called The Great Simoleon Caper explored a private, cryptographic digital currency using private keys called CryptoCredits.
His most in-depth work detailing a plan to set up money outside of the control of the state was the 1999 doorstopper opus Cryptonomicon, whose title was partly inspired by the Cyphernomicon FAQ.
Stephenson was so influential among the cypherpunks that some believe the Bitcoin White Paper was deliberately released on his birthday, October 31, in honor of his work.
Others have even suggested — only half jokingly — that he might be Satoshi himself. Reason Magazine put out an article in 2019 saying he probably wasn’t, but it wouldn’t be that surprising if he was.
“It’s plausible that Neal Stephenson invented, or helped invent, Bitcoin, because that is simply the sort of thing that Neal Stephenson might do,” wrote Peter Suderman in the piece.
Stephenson tells Magazine during an interview in Singapore he’s been fascinated by codes and cyphers since he was a kid in the 1960s.
“I was a little code-breaking geek when I was a little boy,” he says in his thoughtful drawl.“On the dust flap of the original edition [of Cryptonomicon] there’s a picture that my Mom or Dad took for me when I was probably eight years old, lying on a couch reading a book about code.”
Hanging out with Habitat’s cypherpunks
Cryptonomicon came about partly due to the success of Snowcrash. In the mid-1990s he began hanging out with the cypherpunk devs behind an early proto-Metaverse called Habitat. They’d politely let him know they independently coined the term ‘avatar’ some years before Stephenson used it judiciously in the book.
Created by LucasFilm in the mid-1980s for Commodore 64s on dial-up, it was later acquired by Fujitsu and released for free on the web.
“It was an interesting combination of cultures,” says Stephenson. “It was both hippie west coast Berkeley, and at the same time, you know, very strong libertarian, anti-central authority, owning guns, being ready to defend yourself, kind of mentality.”
A core issue with having other people’s avatars come into your virtual space is working out a safe way to run “code from random strangers on the internet,” which Stephenson describes as “a crypto problem all the way.”
He says these Bay Area cypherpunks were initially focused on privacy and decentralized power, “and then at one point I came down and suddenly they were all talking about money,” he says.
“A whole world sprang up around finding ways to do monetary systems that were independent of government. But this was all pre-blockchain, okay? So none of that had been invented yet.”
Bitcoin without blockchainin Cryptonomicon
Intrigued by the idea, Stephenson set about imagining how it might happen, in page after page of comprehensively researched and credible detail — just as his recent Terminal Shock novel imagines how geoengineering to stop climate change might happen in practice.
Cryptonomicon is a techno-thriller that traces the history of cryptography, from Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park crew that broke the Nazi’s Enigma code in WW2, to their modern-day descendants who try to build uncensorable, privacy-preserving electronic money.
The e-money in the novel explicitly references digital gold, uses public key cryptography, digital signatures and fulfils the cypherpunk aim of establishing money outside the control of the state and banks.
The key difference is that in the absence of blockchain, the solution he settled on was to host the system in a hardened offshore data center in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta.
Stephenson says this was inspired by various cypherpunk plans to run e-money out of libertarian jurisdictions such as North Sea seasteading platform Sealand or the island of Anguilla.
“It was some years later that blockchain was invented and made all of that stuff irrelevant, so no one needed to think in terms of having a server in a special room somewhere that was safe.”
In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel said Cryptonomicon was required reading in the early days of Paypal, which may help explain David Sacks and Elon Musk’s interest in the…
cointelegraph.com