Skip to main content

21 Lessons: What I've Learned By Falling Down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole by Gigi

Not recommended for brand new beginners to Bitcoin; you'll want some foundation in order to really get value from this book. I'd first recommend completing a brief and easy reading list of 1) Saifedean Ammous' The Bitcoin Standard, 2) Ben Mezrich's Bitcoin Billionaires, and 3) Nathaniel Popper's Digital Gold

Then, I recommend listening to at least a few long-form podcasts on Bitcoin (for example Robert Breedlove on Lex Fridman's podcast, or a few episodes of Robert Breedlove's extensive podcast series with Michael Saylor). After that, then tackle this book.

And if you don't have the attention span to dedicate the necessary time to do these things, Bitcoin probably isn't for you. Yet. 

This book is a generous gift from quite an original thinker, and I strongly encourage spending as much time as you can eavesdropping on Gigi on literally any podcast where you can find him (he's done a lot; start by searching "Gigi Bitcoin" on Youtube). 

Bitcoin is a fascinating domain on many levels, and it is dangerous to approach it with anything other than true epistemic humility. In fact, know-it-all type people seem doomed to not understand it, and condescension towards Bitcoin tends to be an excellent indicator of midwittery (I'm speaking from experience here as a person who didn't "get" Bitcoin at first either, thanks to my own damn midwittery). 

Notes:
The book has three sections: philosophical teachings of Bitcoin, economic teachings of Bitcoin and technological teachings of Bitcoin. Each mini-chapter contains the author's musings and insights about Bitcoin across a wide ranges of domains, ending in a one-sentence "learning" like the moral at the end of an Aesop's fable. 

Part 1: Philosophy
1) Bitcoin taught me that it won't change. I will.
2) In a time of abundance, Bitcoin taught me what real scarcity is.
3) Bitcoin taught me that locality is a tricky business.
4) Bitcoin taught me that decentralization contradicts identity.
5) Bitcoin taught me that narratives are important. (On the "immaculate conception" of Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto's disappearance)
6) Bitcoin taught me that in a free society, free speech and free software are unstoppable.
7) Bitcoin taught me that I know very little about almost anything. It taught me that this rabbit hole is bottomless.

Part 2: Economics
8) Bitcoin taught me to look behind the curtain and face my financial ignorance.
9) Bitcoin taught me about the hidden tax of inflation and the catastrophe of hyperinflation. (Me too, which sent me to reading When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson)
10) Bitcoin taught me that value is subjective but not arbitrary.
11) Bitcoin taught me what money is.
12) Bitcoin taught me about the history of money and the greatest sleight of hand in the history of economics: fiat currency.
13) Bitcoin taught me the fractional reserve banking is pure insanity.
14) Bitcoin taught me that sound money is essential.

Part 3: Technology
"No amount of coercive force will ever solve a math problem."
15) Bitcoin taught me that there is strength in numbers.
16) Bitcoin taught me not to trust, but to verify.
17) Bitcoin taught me that telling the time is tricky, especially if you are decentralized.
18) Bitcoin taught me that moving slowly is one of its features, not a bug.
19) Bitcoin taught me that privacy is not dead.
20) Bitcoin taught me that cypherpunks write code. (See Steven Levy's excellent book Crypto
21) Bitcoin taught me that understanding the past is essential to understanding its future. A future which is just beginning... (Bitcoin as an enabling technology, like the internet or like electricity)

"I don't believe we shall ever have good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop." --Friedrich Hayek

To Read:
Daniel Dennett: Where Am I? (PDF file online) [A great short science fiction story that really messes with your head about where "you" literally are.]
Ron Paul: End the Fed
Bruce Schneier: Applied Cryptography
Giannina Braschi: Empire of Dreams (poetry)
Andreas M. Antonopolous: Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain
Ludwig von Mises: Human Action 

Media: 
One the Brink Podcast (with Nic Carter and Matt Walsh: see especially their weekly news roundups, which are excellent for keeping up with Bitcoin/cryptocurrency industry and regulatory news)

More Posts

Broken Money by Lyn Alden

Our money is broken, and the sooner we wrap our minds around the implications, the better. In Broken Money, Lyn Alden, a lucid writer and gifted teacher, offers a highly readable grand tour of monetary history: she explains the emergence of money, what makes a good or bad money, how money gradually became more and more "abstracted" away from gold, and how the modern fiat financial system evolved. Most importantly, she explains, clearly, how inflation, purposely designed into the modern system, is used as a wealth extraction tool: "...the financial system in its current form is designed in such a way that 1) the money supply continually inflates, 2) purchasing power is gradually siphoned away from savers and toward arbitrageurs who sit near the source of money creation, 3) the system rewards large and well connected entities at the cost of small and poorly connected entities, 4) liabilities gradually shift from the private sector to the public sector to keep the system f...

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy

This is a blatantly repetitive and poorly-organized book, and yet it's still highly useful: filled with good tactics and reminders to observe and control your thinking--and more importantly, to be attentive to the implications of your thinking. Thoughts are things! How you think and the beliefs you hold play an enormous role in your reality. And so, despite its flaws, I think The Power of Your Subconscious Mind is still worthwhile. Think of it as a book-length practice of autosuggestion, or even a sort of extended mantra. The book's repetitiveness then becomes a benefit: it helps you practice and build good mental habits, it gives you plenty of examples of affirmations and mental scripts to apply to various life situations, and so on. A minor warning: if you consider NLP , autosuggestion or visualization and affirmation techniques to be useless woo-woo silliness, do not read this book. It's not for you. [A quick  affiliate link to readers to the book here . You ca...

The Best Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham

This was my first experience reading this author. Competent short stories, some very good.  The author has a knack for creating a mood and for creating an arc of tension and release. See for example the short story "Rain" where the reader really feels the smothering monsoon on the islands of Samoa, or see the story "P.&O." with its atmosphere of genuine foreboding as one of the main characters lies ill in a ship's sick bay, but then an expiation and release of that tension as the story's central character puts her own mind right about a past wrong done to her. Finally, an auxiliary benefit to readers: we get a well-fleshed out picture of the British Empire in the early 20th century. If we had to name this era, maybe we could call it "post-peak UK." It was a time of clear class distinctions, obvious-but-unwritten proprieties and competent English functionality worldwide: on transcontinental train trips, on multi-week steamer passages--wherever ...