Synopsis

Digital Gold charts the rise of Bitcoin from its origins in 2009 as the brainchild of a Wizard of Oz like programmer, Satoshi Nakamoto, to its evolution into the prevailing currency for transactions on the deep web drug retailer, Silk Road, to its present incarnation as a rising, volatile force in the financial sector and an increasingly relevant part of consumers lives.

Nathaniel Popper’s book will delineate the participation of dozens of unusual characters who came to be major players in the global digital currency movement.

The book travels from Japan, the purported home of the reclusive Nakamoto, to Brooklyn College, where Charlie Shrem, a short, slubby senior co founded BitInstant with an autistic Welshman named Gareth Nelson,to Seattle, where Peter Vessenes, an ambitious entrepreneur, first attracted and then repelled investors and also to the lava plains of Iceland, where Emmanuel Abiodun’s large scale Bitcoin mining company runs complex algorithms 24 hours a day to unearth new Bitcoins.