"…[C]ryptocurrency, and digital currency broadly, continue creating shifting circuits of transactional culture. A sort of code rush4 is taking place, in which various digital forms of currency prevail over conventionally tangible, visible forms.
In earlier times, and especially during the US gold rush, a transaction for an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century settler or Indigenous person might be paid for using a combination of currencies: gold (in its many forms), dentalium and olivella, fur pelts, beads, baskets, turquoise, blankets, copper, ooligan grease, woodpecker scalps, specie (metal coins), and ledgers, to name a few. While Indigenous trading is still very much a living practice, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, most payments look a bit different. It is likely that we pay with a singular transfer of digital numbers representing money, using a bank account and a plastic card, or a phone app like Apple Pay or Google Pay. We could open our purses and wallets and find a mixture of currencies to pay with: gift cards, crumpled dollar bills and stray coins, certificates, and plastic cards that afford credit through debt or debit our accounts automatically. Or, we could transfer one of a plethora of cryptocurrencies to someone on the other side of the globe in a matter of minutes, even if cryptocurrency is currently treated as more of an asset than a day-to- day currency. Today, someone could offer as money nothing but the perceived magic and social guarantee of digital data and still acquire most goods and services. These forms of payment compete just as gold and shells did in the 1850s, but today’s shift to a digital world is also shifting humanity’s relationship to money."
4. The cryptocurrency code rush is my play on words, acknowledging the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century. I want to suggest that cryptocurrency is a popular resource that, once “discovered” in 2009, attracted mass interest and cultural shifts. Its mining practice reflects its connection to mining gold (and other minerals). See also Bill Maurer, Taylor C. Nelms, and Lana Swartz, “‘When Perhaps the Real Problem Is Money Itself!’:The Practical Materiality of Bitcoin,”
Social Semiotics 23, no. 2 (March 2013): 261–277.
Copyright © 2025 by Ashley Cordes. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
