What I Just Read

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 Y...

I can see why this book sits high up in the Bitcoin canon . It's about much more than a dispute over how large bitcoin blocks should be, which turned out to be a heated, multiyear war with all kinds of twists and turns. But it's also about how things aren't always as they seem, about how people foolishly stake their reputations and credibility on the wrong things, and about the importance of thinking long term--really, really long term--about what this "Bitcoin thing" really is and why we shouldn't muck around with it too much. So many aspects of this debate were absolutely fascinating:  * One side (the big blockers) routinely failed to see second-order consequences, while the other side (the small blockers) rarely failed  not  to see them. Frankly, the big blockers were outclassed on nearly every front, as the small blockers had a far more sophisticated understanding of both the technical and economic implications of Bitcoin. Also the small blockers brillian...

 An uneven and at times repetitive book, but yet a book that absolutely must be read by anyone who wants to learn about Bitcoin and why Bitcoin matters.  Some chapters sing out with a compelling bull case for Bitcoin and offer lay readers an excellent rendering of monetary history. In other chapters the author gets bogged down in repetitive economic hand waving, while blaming everything bad about modernity (and I mean * everything * up to and including Miley Cyrus's twerking) on leaving a sound money standard.  Most reasonable readers--and certainly anyone who's at least ankle deep in learning about Bitcoin--would agree on the value of sound money and the value of holding monetary authorities to a sound money standard. But for Saifedean the lack of a sound money is a hammer in his hand... and the entire world is a nail. I've found this to be a problem for many Bitcoiners, especially Bitcoin maximalists, hence the often used phrase "Bitcoin solves this" used...

Useful for deepening your understanding of money, its origin, and the central role of bitcoin in a future monetary paradigm. This crisp, short book is a genuine gift, and I've already made a note to reread it about a year from now to re-groove the ideas in it. Notes: * Considering money in "layers" as a prism for understanding our monetary system: a pyramid of layers going all the way up to base layer money or "layer one" money. * Gold (the first layer one money) moves toward being traded non-physically: in the form of deposit slips representing the underlying gold. And those deposit slips become a type of money that can be used for exchange. Further, this is much easier than physically carrying/moving/exchanging the underlying gold itself. * Solving the problem of needing a unified form of money, one that was less debaseable than other forms, developing the first money market in Antwerp in 1531, where there could be price discovery for various second layer mon...

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...