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

Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman

I've now read three of Thomas Friedman's books, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World Is Flat, and now, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. And Hot Flat and Crowded is--by far--the weakest book of the three. In fact, a cynic might consider it more of a brand extension than a book--a recycling of The World is Flat to include well-meaning and repetitive chapters on energy policy, the environment and global warming. And despite his earnest and palliative writing tone, Friedman's political message has become shrill, and that shrillness debases many of the potentially intriguing ideas and arguments he makes throughout the book. According to Friedman, everything is the Americans' fault. We're supposed to be leaders of the free world, yet we should only act with the consensus blessing of all the rest of the world's countries. We invaded Iraq, which was wrong. We invaded Afghanistan, which was sort of right, but we're making far too many mistakes there. We don't educat...
Read more

How to Make Money in Any Market by Jim Cramer

Not Cramer's best, although there are insights here. I recommend instead two of Cramer's earlier works: Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World  and Getting Back to Even . The central idea in  How to Make Money in Any Market  is to structure your portfolio with roughly half of your assets in a low-fee S&P 500 index fund, and roughly the other half in five or so carefully researched "hero" stocks that are meant to be long-term secular growers and compounders over time. A remaining sliver of your portfolio should be in some sort of hedge: gold or Bitcoin [1] . Chapter 7 walks readers through this elegant portfolio structure. [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!] The books' weaknesses show u...
Read more

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Fascinating and challenging 1960s-era sci-fi about the incredible, even unimaginable, difficulties involved in first contact between civilizations. The planet Solaris features a strange, tissue-like surface that usually acts like a liquid, but can also spontaneously form all sorts of shapes and geological formations. It has been studied and debated over by generations of Earth scientists, many of whom believe the planet itself exhibits a form of intelligence, perhaps even consciousness and self-awareness.   Unlike TV sci-fi, where aliens always seem to be other actors wearing bumpy rubber foreheads who all somehow speak great English, this is "hard-science" sci-fi, and it traffics in the much more plausible notion that an alien species would have an intelligence so radically different from ours that we might never understand it. Author Stanislaw Lem tells the story in a nested and indirect fashion, reminding the reader a bit of Mary Shelley's  Frankenstein . The reader ...
Read more