"All money is a technology of future-making. We only accept a particular money as payment because we think it will be accepted tomorrow by someone else. Every transaction is a prediction, and therefore an affirmation, of a particular future.
[...]
If all money is a bet on the future, it is also a summoning of a future. When people design new money forms, it is usually with the goal of telling a new story about the future. Think of how euro notes have imaginary architecture — fictional bridges and arches intended to conjure a shared “European” past in order to project a shared European future.
[...]
Extropians also had a libertarian bent: They believed in the ability of money to create a cybernetic system that could power this new world. But if you truly believe, as the Extropians did, that you will outlive the world’s governments and even its financial institutions, how do you make a monetary vehicle that will too? How do you set a store of value that will persist and even grow as you await revivification in your cryonic chamber?
The answer, essentially, is cryptocurrency. You set your money and its value outside the things you think are crumbling. You secure it with the things you see as eternal: cryptography and markets.
[...]
There is magic in deferral. If we can just increase the time horizon, some things disintegrate but others fall into place. Despite imagining a future initially filled with chaos and collapse for ordinary people, Extropians consider themselves deeply optimistic.
Today’s cryptocurrency communities are similarly summoning a future. Some of those futures look a lot like the one the Extropians imagined; indeed, some of today’s Bitcoin old guard were themselves part of the Extropian groups decades ago.
Lana Swartz 'Bitcoin As A Meme And A Future'
in Noema (2021) (link)