Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains

Bitcoin began in obscurity, yet today companies of every size accept digital currencies and build on blockchain systems. Quinn DuPont examines how these tools are changing the way value moves through digital media and everyday economic life, while lawmakers and ordinary citizens struggle to judge what they mean.

DuPont approaches the subject through the people who build and use these systems, the financial promises and dangers they carry, and the shifts they cause in politics and law. He also surveys the uses being tried in social and industrial settings, and asks what all of this implies for the economy ahead.

His central claim is that blockchains are better understood as social technologies than as purely technical breakthroughs. On this view, they give developers and users a way to test new arrangements of social and political influence. The book is a measured assessment rather than a sales pitch.

It suits students and researchers in culture, politics, media and economics, along with anyone who wants to follow or shape how work and society may change.