Skip to main content

Bitcoin Billionaires by Ben Mezrich

Pair this book with Nathaniel Popper's "Digital Gold" and it will give you solid background knowledge of Bitcoin's history, the players involved, and the various dramas that happened along the way (Silk Road, Mt. Gox, BitInstant, etc.). 

"Bitcoin Billionaires" is a faster read, better paced and written like a novel, and it tells the narrative largely from the standpoint of the Winklevoss twins and Charlie Shrem. If you've read Mezrich's "Bringing Down the House" you know he's a good writer with a good sense of how to pace and arrange a story. 

"Digital Gold" is more like the type of history a journalist would write, which is exactly what it is: Popper covered Bitcoin and many of these events for the NY Times. Both good reads, both well-written. 

PS: One final, unrelated thought: You'll come away from this book with a good understanding of Mark Zuckerberg's ethical compass (actually, his lack thereof). It makes it extremely difficult to justify actively using Facebook. 

More Posts

The Prophet of Edan by Philip Chase [The Edan Trilogy #2]

We all have our part to play and our duty to perform. This is a beautiful novel about performing your duty with honor, even in the face of almost certain failure. Author Philip Chase has an unusual gift for telling a compelling story, and The Prophet of Edan works on two levels: on the individual level, with characters we care about and root for, and on the grand, civilizational level, where entire nations  hurl themselves at each other in a desperate war of survival. And the geopolitical dramas in Philip's world of Eormenlond are downright Kissingerian --with betrayal, realpolitik and honor, all in equal measure. Now, any story with a large cast and a lot of moving parts presents the author with a structural challenge: how do you help the reader keep everybody and everything straight, but yet do it in a way that's organic to the story? After all, this is the second part of a trilogy,  and a lot happened in Book I . So I'll share an example here of what this author does,...
Read more

The Investor's Manifesto by William J. Bernstein

In just under 200 pages, The Investor's Manifesto gives you everything you need to manage your investments: * A historically grounded discussion of the tradeoffs between risk and return, * How to design an investment portfolio using index funds, including advice on withdrawal rates and how (and how often) to rebalance, * A good discussion of human psychological biases (the author uses the wonderful phrase "investing psychopathology" to describe this topic), and * How to navigate the financial services industry without getting your head handed to you. Finally, there's a chapter that summarizes everything, followed by a solid reading list for continuing your investment education, broken down by topic: theory, history, psychology, and business. Anyone wanting to reach a reasonable competence level in investing should read at least one of William Bernstein's books. This one or The Four Pillars of Investing  will suffice. Since he's not a Wall Street guy--he's...
Read more

The Rule by Larry Hite [Investing]

It is always valuable to read books from investors who use a different approach from yours. The underlying idea is to develop all-weather investing skills by studying a range of techniques and styles, so you can survive, and even thrive, in any investment environment. Author Larry Hite describes himself as a "trend-follower," and while he found most of his success in commodities, he's willing to traffic in practically anything that moves. It gets the reader to think agnostically about asset classes and sectors, since any investment anywhere can have a trend you can ride.  In other words, think about ways to widen the cast of your net while you widen your range of techniques and styles. Hite made his fortune a few different times, and suffered a spectacular blow-up when one of his employees hid trades in interest rate futures from him. It's not always the case, but usually the guys who blow up--and yet manage to get wealthy a second time--speak most knowledgeably about...
Read more