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

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn is really two books: a good one and a bad one. The good one, the first fifteen or sixteen chapters, is engaging, original and beautiful. The second book, the bad one, is hackneyed, inorganic, farcical, and in places nearly unreadable.  It feels like the overall work was written by two different people, which in fact it more or less was: the Mark Twain of 1876, fresh off the tremendous success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the Mark Twain of seven years later, cramped with financial stress and writer's block. Thus the back two-thirds of the book feels more like a collection of vaguely related short stories than a coherent novel, with random characters entering and exiting the stage to resuscitate an increasingly cadaverous plot. Twain is even forced to wedge Tom Sawyer back into the story late in the book, thanks to one of American literature's least plausible coincidences. It brings to mind Virginia Woolf's famously condescending remark about the no...
Read more

Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler

A difficult book, in part because Adler isn't all that good at expressing his ideas: he's a practitioner, not a writer, and it shows. Further, I believe Understanding Human Nature has more in direct value than direct value: the reader has to move from what the book teaches to a layer of second-order insights. I'll explain what I mean in a moment. First a quick summary of the book's core themes and ideas. According to Adler, we all have a psyche, formed and largely fixed in childhood, and that psyche has an ulterior psychological goal. For most of us, unfortunately, that goal takes the form of striving for power, control, attention, or superiority. Throughout the book Adler gives examples where peoples' psyche-driven strivings cause suffering, both for themselves as well as everyone else in their blast radius. Most of us will likely resist Adler's claim that to understand other people and their motivations you must first understand their psyches' "ulter...
Read more

Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

A wonderful, beautiful work. Ask me about it, and I'll start nattering at you about sphex wasps, fugues, isomorphisms and "jumping out of the system." And my voice will trail off and you'll see me get a faraway look in my eyes. It's actually quite difficult to describe what this book is about--at least, impossible to describe in a few short sentences. [1] But there are so many ways to read Godel, Escher, Bach , and such a wide range of ideas and insights one can get out of it, that it becomes a different book for every reader. And let me confess, if you haven't read GEB  yet, I am jealous of you. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] First of all this book can be understood on many levels. You can read it a...
Read more