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

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Tedious, weak, and worst of all  "riddled" with errors  and oversights. Do not read. I recommend instead  Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction  by J. Allan Hobson  for information about the REM/dreaming stage of sleep, as well as  Restful Sleep  by Deepak Chopra  for readers interested in practical help for improving sleep quality. Unlike Why We Sleep , both of these books are short, direct, readable and clear. Sadly, I also have to spend a brief few sentences  on Alexey Guzey's devastating criticisms of this book . Alexey's entire post is very much worth reading, but if you want to see just one glaring example of atrocious academic ethics, you can start with a chart Matthew Walker uses in Chapter 6 to prove a linear relationship between sleep loss and sports injury-- except that he cuts off the part of the chart that disproves his argument . This is childish middle school stuff, way beneath the line of a Berkeley and Harvard professor, a...
Read more

Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis by Tyler Disney

Tremendously useful. This is a book about meta-preparation: about what it really means to be prepared when you don't know the future. It teaches readers how to think about skill development, optionality and flexibility--and by virtue of these meta-tools, how to earn true individual self-sovereignty. Deep Response is a sophisticated strategy-level discussion hidden in a simple story: a thirty-something man goes back in time to offer guidance to his twenty-something younger self. Their discussions are engrossing on many, many levels, as the two characters--with radically different perspectives, despite being the same person--work out various life problems. The older character wants to warn the younger man that all of his strivings will eventually cause him to achieve nearly the exact opposite of what he seeks, and worse, if he doesn't adjust, his life will soon lack enough flexibility to do anything about it. The reader is the lucky beneficiary, getting exposure to a wide-rangi...
Read more

By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy by Michael G. Vickers

The least deceptive way to read this endless, muddled and minutia-laden memoir would be to view it as a very long piece of propaganda: a type of limited hangout of all of the covert (and overt) things the United States does globally in its attempts to project power. It can also be read as an attempt at an extended--and I mean extended --defense of the CIA and all of its meddlings all over the world. This is if you actually read the book. Don't. Piled up with words but saying little of substance, this is the most obfuscatory memoir I've ever read. The author's voice fundamentally irritates: he has a compulsive need to share staggering amounts of unnecessary detail, he comes across as a relentless credit hog, and he repeatedly attempts to place himself right in the middle of the action--even when it's clear he wasn't. Perhaps least ethical of all, he has a habit of framing his actions and decisions so they appear more correct and predictive in retrospect than they ac...
Read more