What I Just Read

I found this book to be a useful predecessor work to the key current books on Bitcoin ( Bitcoin Standard , Bitcoin Billionaires , Digital Gold). It is a readable history of the fundamental cryptography principles that Bitcoin was later built on, and there is some brief discussion of David Chaum's Digicash and other examples some of the proto-Bitcoin moneys. Thus it's not a central work for understanding Bitcoin, but it is a central work to understand the friction between governments and the wide dissemination of cryptographic technology.  You'll see striking examples of bravery among academic and scientific institutions that fought against control and censorship from the NSA as they discovered and explored cryptographic techniques. This strikes the reader as a sharp contrast to the rather cowardly and complicit behavior seen today among academic and scientific institutions in the face of government control and censorship.  It's also striking to the reader to see the abs...

"That's when I first realized that not all physical and mental limitations are real, and that I had a habit of giving up way too soon." A worthwhile addition to your shelf of motivational books, with a free bonus: the very act of reading this book will have a psychological effect on you: I found myself getting up even earlier than I normally do during the two weeks I read it, I did more (and harder) workouts, I pushed myself more, I fasted more. I don't know why and I don't care why, it just happened, and it's a bonus gift from the author. Also, a friendly warning: a subset of readers will be offended by Goggins' language. "Motherfucker" appears so often in Can't Hurt Me that the reader becomes blind to it. Also a confession: I laughed out loud as Goggins mockingly tells himself to "hem his vagina." If this kind of stuff bothers you, this book is not for you. Readers who can get past this have a gem of a book on their hands that e...

"Legends are built in many ways, but part of such legends consists of accusations made by enemies, and often for their own benefit." The life and story of Pablo Escobar as told by his brother Roberto, who handled the accounting, the money--and the laundering of that money. Understandably, the book is near-hagiographical, but it gives a fascinating perspective on the life of Pablo Escobar, and this perspective helps explain why he remains a popular figure today in the Antiochia/Medellin region of Colombia.  Unexpectedly, there are some very interesting business insights here, as well as an interesting recent history of both the country of Colombia and its (often twisted) relations with the United States.  The structure of the book would benefit from an in medias res introduction, and the translation is a bit too literal at times (I read this book in English and haven't seen any of the original text).  Also a complex story with complex ethics. For example there are ma...

A family member saw me reading this book, and he asked me, "You're reading that book a few decades too late, aren't you?" On the contrary: I love to read investment books outside of the market cycle that they were written in. It shows the folly of prediction, the near-uselessness of reading books that tell you what's going to happen.  Note that I said near -uselessness: Books like this protect me from being manipulated by "predictors" in the media who write or say things now. And it keeps me humble about (and unattached to) my own predictions, my own thinking about the future. This is why I read books like this from time to time.  Almost always, the predictions in any prediction-y book (especially a prediction-y book about the stock market) will be hilariously wrong, and this book is no exception. This author, for example, believed a big bear market is coming--a really big one, to the point where he calls it the Greater Depression. He believed it would ...