Perfect Money: How Zero-Knowledge Proofs Finished What Bitcoin Started (HARDCOVER)

Author: Porter, Frank Michael

Binding: Hardcover

Number Of Pages: 209

Release Date: 13-07-2026 

Format: Hardcover

"Financial privacy is not a niche and should not be treated as inherently suspicious. Frank Porter’s Perfect Money is an exceptional book." - Paul Brigner, Chief Policy and Regulatory Officer, Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), on 'Perfect Money'.

Every civilization that gained the power to watch its people's money used it. One technology finally broke the pattern.
For two thousand years, the ledger belonged to someone else. Rome taxed what the census recorded. Venice fed a stone lion's mouth with anonymous denunciations. East Germany filed one hundred kilometers of its citizens' secrets, and the modern financial system quietly perfected what they started: a world where every purchase you make writes a permanent record for whoever asks later.
Then a rejected 1985 mathematics paper resurfaced, and everything changed.
Perfect Money tells the explosive true story of Zcash and the zero-knowledge proof, the cryptographic breakthrough that lets a ledger verify every transaction while seeing none of them. Investigative in depth and thriller-paced from the first page, it follows the money from a Roman census line to a Hong Kong hotel room, from the collapse of DigiCash to Bitcoin's fatal compromise, from the $3.6 billion Bitfinex takedown to the strangest week in cryptography, when six strangers burned their own computers so that a secret could die on schedule.
Inside, you'll discover why Bitcoin's transparent blockchain became the ultimate surveillance tool, sold on subscription to governments worldwide. You'll walk through the zero-knowledge proof itself, explained so clearly that no technical background is required. You'll meet Zooko Wilcox, the DigiCash veteran Satoshi Nakamoto once linked to, who spent two decades building the missing half of digital money. And you'll understand what programmable central bank digital currencies actually mean for your financial freedom, straight from the central banks' own published research.
Written for readers of Andy Greenberg's Tracers in the Dark, Annie Jacobsen, and anyone who suspects financial privacy is about to become the most valuable property money can have, this book delivers history, cryptography, and a bull case for human freedom in one relentless narrative.
The surveillance state took two thousand years to perfect its machine. The answer took forty. This is the story of how mathematics won.
Perfect for readers interested in: Zcash, zero-knowledge proofs, Bitcoin history, cryptocurrency investing, financial privacy, blockchain technology, CBDCs, digital currency, cypherpunks, encryption, surveillance, monetary freedom, crypto books, and ZEC

EAN: 9798187041244

Package Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches

Languages: English