Daemon and Bitcoin go way back. In a response to Satoshi's release of the original Bitcoin software on the Cryptography Mailing List, Dan Geer said:

Incidentally, I highly recommend Daniel Suarez's Daemon; trust me as to its relevance.

Daemon was self-published in 2006. Its daemon (like the d from bitcoind) is a computer program that exists across the internet, replicating and storing pieces of itself, triggering new processes by listening for keywords or events, always self-reorganizing. It is so widely distributed that it cannot be destroyed. But it is incredibly well resourced, and by using those resources, compels many people to act in accordance with its program. Sounds a lot like Bitcoin...

I'll tell you what the Daemon is: the Daemon is a remorseless system for building distributed civilization. A civilization that perpetually regenerates. One with no central authority. Your only option is what form that civilization takes.

But the Daemon isn't a demon, at least not a bad one. It is impartiality, it's real law that is enforced equally across all people (well, maybe, the Daemon certainly has its heroes and they do seem to get special treatment -- in service of the greater good, of course). This daemon operates a fleet of self-driving cars (and pays for their construction), but they aren't Waymos -- these AUTOM8s are killing machines, eventually upgraded into sword-wielding motorcycles called Razorbacks (would it be a cyberpunk story if it didn't have swords on motorcycles?). This daemon lays traps for the faceless wielders of power and shows that it is better than them by inflicting pain. This daemon sounds a lot like a real demon.

Suarez gave a talk in 2008 about living in a bot-mediated reality. He concludes by saying:

I've warned you all that although bots do permeate the modern world and they present a potential danger to us and they're not going away I really do think that we can achieve a symbiotic relationship with narrow AI and I think we can make them the impartial arbiters of a democratic society then I think that's the type of network we should be working on.

Suarez is writing about asteroid mining now. He hasn't published a book since the rise of LLM-based AI. I wonder what he thinks of the themes of Daemon now as our reality is becoming ever more mediated by bots.

In 2008, his fear was this:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.