Out-of-the-Box Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain Luke Tredinnick London Metropolitan University, UK It has often been noted that the Internet was forged in the crucible of the US West Coast counterculture; a character- istic libertarian attitude was consequently hard-wired into its underlying design (Naughton, 2000; cf. Tredinnick, 2008, 2009). That libertarian attitude faded as commercial and national interests came to dominate the World Wide Web; indeed, the dominant debate today is as likely to be about the power of state control, surveillance capitalism and transborder political interference (e.g. Zittrain, 2008; cf. Laybats and Tredinnick, 2016a,b). It is comforting then perhaps that in one area the political radicalism that fired network culture has been rekindled: cryptocurrencies. They embody the political idealism of cyberculture, robustly individualist, resistant to political, state and regulatory interference, and rooted in distributed trust networks. Through them the political ideals of the early internet have begun to penetrate the most conservative of corporate boardrooms. Cryptocurrencies have become one of the emerging technological trends of the last five years. Moving beyond their original association with the dark web, illicit trading and ransomware, they are becoming a part of the fabric of digital transactions, and their underlying technologies promise to offer solutions in many kinds of business pro- cesses where control over extended chains of transactions dependent on trust and susceptible to fraud is a factor, from managing supply chains to securing intellectual property rights. But what are cryptocurrencies, how do they work and what role do they have in the information world? This issue of Out-of-the Box explores the disruptive potential of cryptocurrencies and the promise of their underlying technologies. What are cryptocurrencies? Cryptocurrencies (sometimes cryptoassets) are digital assets that are designed to be used as forms of exchange somewhat like traditional money. As the name implies, they exploit strong cryptography to secure exchange. Like most traditional currencies, today they do not possess an intrinsic value; their value is set through transactions. As a consequence, cryptocurrencies tend to be volatile. How- ever, while in one sense just another kind of money, cryptocurrency is unlike traditional currencies in several important ways. They are not controlled by any central authority such as a national or transnational central bank. No organization or agency underwrites the value of the currency or issues more currency into the system. Scarcity is maintained through the equations that are used to vali- date transactions. Cryptocurrencies are by their nature decentralized and as a consequence offer a form of exchange independent of state control. It is these charac- teristics that exemplify libertarian ideals of cyberculture. The oldest and most well-known cryptocurrency in widespread use is bitcoin. It was first mooted in a 2008 paper published under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto – a pseudonym used to conceal the identity of the creator, either an individual or more probably a collective. The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto remains a mystery to this day. The open-source bitcoin software was released a year later, and in 2009, the network was initiated when the genesis block of the bitcoin blockchain was mined. Bitcoin flour- ished from its inception, its initial growth driven by dark web applications most famously the Silk Road website; the essentially anonymous nature of transactions and the lack of central authority made it ideally suited to illicit trading and criminal enterprise. But over the last five years, the value of bitcoin has largely been driven by speculation rather than by crime, and the currency has increasingly found uses in mainstream commercial contexts. Bitcoin, or currencies very much like it, may very well become staple parts of our everyday financial environment of the twenty-first century. That of course poses a number of challenges around regulation, security and the role of the nation state. When you spend bitcoins, you do not transfer a physical artefact but a piece of code that is moved from one digital wallet to another. These transactions rely on peer-to-peer networking. Normally, the workload of distributing files across a digital network is managed by servers; with peer-to-peer networks that workload is distributed across the devices attached to the network each of which takes a Corresponding author: Luke Tredinnick. Email: l.tredinnick@londonmet.ac.uk Business Information Review 2019, Vol. 36(1) 39–44 ª The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0266382119836314 journals.sagepub.com/home/bir