Digital Gold charts the rise of Bitcoin from its origins in 2009 as the brainchild of a Wizard of Oz-like programmer, Satoshi Nakamoto, to its evolution into the prevailing currency for transactions on the deep web drug retailer, Silk Road, to its present incarnation as a rising, volatile force in the financial sector and an increasingly relevant part of consumers' lives. The author has been covering this story from the outset for The New York Times. Popper's book will delineate the participation of dozens of unusual characters who came to be major players in the global digital currency movement. The book travels from Japan, the purported home of the reclusive Nakamoto; to Brooklyn College, where Charlie Shrem, a short, slubby senior cofounded BitInstant with an autistic Welshman named Gareth Nelson; to Seattle, where Peter Vessenes, an ambitious entrepreneur, first attracted and then repelled investors; and also to the lava plains of Iceland, where Emmanuel Abiodun's large-scale Bitcoin-mining company runs complex algorithms 24 hours a day to unearth new Bitcoins. As digital currencies have become relevant players for business, some of its earliest founders have lost their footing. Shrem was arrested in January for money-laundering, while in October, the FBI seized $140 million worth of Bitcoins from Silk Road, whose founder, Ross William Ulbricht, was arrested and charged with conspiracy to traffic narcotics and a host of other crimes.