Neal Stephenson's "The Great Simoleon Caper" (short story, anarchy, free): Anticipating BitCoin in mid 1990s!

This is my first story of Stephenson, though I have Diamond Age lying around somewhere (unread). And if this is typical Stephenson, he just won a new fan.

Its appeal to me might have been both because I'm a programmer, & because I'm fed up with my fiscally irresponsible government. Your leverage will likely vary depending on how excited you get about these things. As a narrative, I'll say it's just about ok; it's the content that I found interesting.

Story summary.

An internet company has invented a new online currency called "Simoleons". With the promise that it will be better managed than the official government issue currency. And, of course, government wants to nip it in the bud.

This is the story of anarchist hackers rescuing the baby currency from government villains.

Fact sheet.

First published: "TIME Domestic SPECIAL ISSUE, Spring 1995 Volume 145, No. 12 (March 1, 1995)".
Download full text from Mark Damon Hughes or Internet Archive. [via Best Science Fiction Stories]
Caution: Later is the badly formatted original from Time magazine; you'll have to endlessly click "next page" that once would have generated more clicks for Time. Former link is much easier to read.
Rating: A.

Gary K Wolfe names his last year's pick from normal, revolutionary, & middle ground scifi novels

At Locus Roundtable.

For a "best of" list, his is a slightly unusual post - names 1 novel each that represents the familiar, future, & middle ground:

1. Normal: "Paul McAuley’s The Quiet War. In terms of the familiar literary merits of character, plot, and style, it’s one of his very best novels—but as SF it’s essentially conservative, representing a 23rd-century interplanetary war of the sort we’ve seen often before, but seldom with such attention to current science and such political and psychological acumen."
2. Revolutionary: "Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which may draw on a number of familiar SF tropes, but which seems to violate nearly every principle we’ve inherited about what SF usually is—in terms not only of its massive length, its leisurely pacing (at least in the opening few hundred pages), its language, its humor, its preoccupations with systems, puzzles, and entire philosophical systems for their own sake. Like much revolutionary science, it may take some years for us to realize its full effect on the field, as people actually begin to finish it."
3. Blend: "Greg Bear’s City at the End of Time ... both hauntingly familiar and energetically innovative."

Related: "best of" lists.