(2005-09-12) Pay Pal Wars

Radley Balko on The PayPal Wars: Battles With EBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth - ISBN:0974670103 - Peter Thiel and Max Levchin had hoped PayPal would grow to become an extra-governmental system of currency (DigiCash), something reminiscent of the world described in Neal Stephenson's novel Crypto Nomicon, in which programmers use encryption to create an offshore Data Haven free from government control... In the book's first chapter, Jackson recalls a speech Thiel gave to Confinnity employees, just a few days after he began work, in which he described his hopes for PayPal to become a borderless private currency (DigiCash). He saw PayPal facilitating trade in currency for anyone with an Internet connection by enabling an instant transfer of funds from insecure currencies to more stable ones, such as U.S. dollars. Thiel explained to his young staff how governments had historically robbed their own citizens through inflation and currency devaluation. The very rich could always protect themselves by investing offshore. It's the poor and middle class, Thiel explained, who get screwed.

Update: I read it, and was disappointed at how much of that radical thinking was discussed in the book. It's mostly a standard/boring corporate history.