The Sovereign Individual
Twelve years before Bitcoin it described money as 'mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence' — and it is still the sharpest account of why decentralisation is a force rather than a feature.
Subtitled How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, and built on one argument: the logic of violence is what has always decided how societies are organised, and microprocessing is about to break it. When information can move without being seized, the state loses its grip on the things it taxes — and the individual stops being an asset on someone’s balance sheet.
The book’s most quoted line is about money: cybermoney will be controlled by private markets, its importance carried by mathematical algorithms with no physical existence. That was written in 1997. The rest of the forecast is less comfortable, and they say so — governments that can no longer tax will not shrug. They will get worse: hostage- taking as withholding tax, sabotage of the technologies that let wealth escape.
What earns it a shelf here is the megapolitics. It doesn’t argue that decentralisation is desirable, it argues it’s what the physics of the situation produces. That is the same claim the protocols I work on are making, twelve years later, in code rather than prose.