Not to minimize what Stross managed, but one of the reasons why he was able to spool out this stuff was because he was on the same transhumanist/extropian/cyphe

Not to minimize what Stross managed, but one of the reasons why he was able to spool out this stuff was because he was on the same transhumanist/extropian/cypherpunk mailing lists where a lot of these concepts were being thrashed out. I feel like he contributed a lot to gelling those ideas together, but he didn't really predict them so much as extrapolate them out -- plus, as others have said, sketched out their downsides. Which is what SF authors are meant to do! Everybody on those lists thought that they would become world-changing technologies -- Later Charlie carefully added the "...and what if that was a really bad thing". Chaumian e-cash had already launched and gone bankrupt by the time Accelerando was being written.