I started writing about bitcoin and cryptocurrency for the funny dumb crook stories. It was ridiculous and arrogant in a particular way that needed and needs puncturing. Somehow this turned into a second job as a finance journalist specialising in the area. The crypto promoters are reprehensible, but their self-sabotaging foolishness makes their comeuppance extremely satisfying. I feel I’m making the world a better place with this.
I wrote
Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts
For Attack, I knew I had to explain the libertarian origins of bitcoin, and Golumbia’s book supplied my reference list for chapter 2. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand why bitcoin.
The political currents that went into bitcoin include several strains that are now accepted as the normal Silicon Valley political position—the “Californian ideology.” Bitcoin shares an ancestry with Silicon Valley startup culture, internet free speech movements, the right wing of transhumanism, and the neoreactionary political movement.
It’s a short book, but it does its homework thoroughly. Cryptocurrency still follows the bitcoin political template in 2023.
Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought. The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written…
Davies’ Lying For Money lays out a taxonomy of fraud, illustrated with amazing stories of real-life frauds.
Per Davies: “A long firm makes you question whether you can trust anyone. A counterfeit makes you question the evidence of your eyes. A control fraud makes you question your trust in the institutions of society and a market crime makes you question society itself.”
Davies’ key trick to spotting a fraud: look at something that’s growing unusually quickly, and examine it in some way it hasn’t been examined before.
Only the second chapter is about cryptocurrency specifically, but understanding how frauds think is fabulously useful in understanding how crypto works. Not even crypto’s frauds are new.
Davies used different stories in the UK and US editions of the book – so get both.
Financial crime seems horribly complicated but there are only so many ways you can con someone out of what's theirs. In fact, there are four. A veteran regulatory economist and market analyst, Dan Davies has years of experience picking the bones out of some of the most famous frauds of the modern age. Now he reveals the big picture that emerges from their labyrinths of deceit.
Along the way you'll find out how to fake a gold mine with a wedding ring, a file and a shotgun. You'll see how close Charles Ponzi, the king of pyramid schemes, came to…
Extraordinary Popular Delusions is a catalogue of financial bubbles.
I often say it’s the best book ever written about bitcoin, and it was published in 1841. Extraordinary Popular Delusions is why you’ve heard about the Dutch Tulip-Mania of the seventeenth century. He also goes into John Law’s Mississippi Scheme.
The 1848 edition adds a note on the then-current Railway Mania, every bit as bubbly as crypto or the dot-com era.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a history of popular folly by Charles Mackay. The book chronicles its targets in three parts: "National Delusions," "Peculiar Follies," and "Philosophical Delusions." Learn why intelligent people do amazingly stupid things when caught up in speculative edevorse. The subjects of Mackay's debunking include alchemy, beards (influence of politics and religion on), witch-hunts, crusades and duels. Present day writers on economics, such as Andrew Tobias, laud the three chapters on economic bubbles.
Popper is a finance journalist and was, for many years, the main writer on crypto at The New York Times.
This is a good history of the early days of bitcoin, up to 2014. I found it essential for my own book. Popper is pretty sympathetic to the characters, and it’s a character-driven book, but the history is usefully accurate.
You’ll see a lot of players who showed up again in crypto later on, such as David Marcus of PayPal, who showed up as the executive in charge of Facebook’s Libra project (the subject of my own second book).
Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
A New York Times technology and business reporter charts the dramatic rise of Bitcoin and the fascinating personalities who are striving to create a new global money for the Internet age.
Digital Gold is New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper's brilliant and engrossing history of Bitcoin, the landmark digital money and financial technology that has spawned a global social movement.
The notion of a new currency, maintained by the computers of users around the world, has been the butt of many jokes, but that has not stopped…
The Basilisk Murders is a mystery centred on the Bay Area “transhumanist” subculture—another offshoot of the Californian Ideology that gave rise to bitcoin, and with much of the same style of grandiose bad thinking, ill-directed idealism, and an undercurrent of fraud.
The characters are also into their bitcoins. It’s a rollicking read, and you don’t have to know anything about these people beforehand to learn and understand why they do what they do.
"Was this going to be the end? I wondered as I sprinted down yet another flight of stairs. Was I going to get caught, and get killed, by a geek serial killer?" When Sarah arrives at a tech conference she's meant to be covering for her magazine, she thinks it'll be a few days away from her marriage problems on a tropical island. Instead, she's surrounded by sleazy men who want to build a computer God, thousands of miles from home and her wife. She hates where she is, and the people who are around her. But when someone starts…
The bizarre and hilarious history of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and the inept criminals and frauds who promote it, from its origins through to the 2017 crypto bubble. This book tells you not only what a bitcoin is, but why a bitcoin is, and what its promoters want: nothing that works, makes sense, or is any good.
Bitcoin and blockchains are not a technology story, but a psychology story. Magic doesn’t happen and fraud is eternal. Remember: if it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is.
I’m an old guy. I say this with a bit of cheek and a certain amount of incongruity. All the books on my list are old. That’s one area of continuity. Another, and I’ll probably stop at two, is that they all deal with ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances—those curveballs of life we flail at with an unfamiliar bat; the getting stuck on the Interstate behind a semi and some geezer in a golf cap hogging the passing lane in a Buick Le Sabre. No one makes it through this life unscathed. How we cope does more to define us than a thousand smiles when things are rosy. Thus endeth the lesson.
Nine Stories Told Completely in Dialogue is a unique collection of narratives, each unfolding entirely through conversations between its characters. The book opens with "God on a Budget," a tale of a man's surreal nighttime visitation that offers a blend of the mundane and the mystical. In "Doctor in the House," readers are plunged into the emotionally charged moment when an oncologist delivers a life-altering diagnosis to a patient. The collection then shifts to "Prisoner 8086," a story about the unlikely friendship that blossoms between a prison volunteer and a habitual offender, exploring themes of redemption and human connection.
Nine Stories Told Completely in Dialogue is a unique collection of narratives, each unfolding entirely through conversations between its characters. The book opens with "God on a Budget," a tale of a man's surreal nighttime visitation that offers a blend of the mundane and the mystical. In "Doctor in the House," readers are plunged into the emotionally charged moment when an oncologist delivers a life-altering diagnosis to a patient. The collection then shifts to "Prisoner 8086," a story about the unlikely friendship that blossoms between a prison volunteer and a habitual offender, exploring themes of redemption and human connection.
