Digital Gold

The journalist Nathaniel Popper starts at the beginning, telling the story of how Bitcoin emerged from message boards and was slowly but surely propelled forward by government-wary libertarians, computer science nerds, and opportunistic venture capitalists.

Popper persuasively articulates the many problems that Bitcoin solves across the world—and then reveals its extremely bumpy road toward adoption. 

Digital Gold is a solid early history of Bitcoin, mainly from the perspective of the startups trying to make it work in the world. 

Nathaniel Popper, who was for years The New York Times’ cryptocurrency guy, manages to go out and recreate a bunch of early scenes from Bitcoin history, and some of those moments are pretty memorable: Like when a bunch of rich guys were passing around 10,000 bitcoin from mobile phone to mobile phone as they all tried it out for the first time. 

It’s mostly missing the miners and the deep cypherpunks, but it does walk you… show more.

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).

Digital Gold is a masterful telling of the history of Bitcoin, written with an incredible amount of detail, scope, and passion. Nathaniel Popper, who was a New York Times journalist at the time he wrote the book, showcased his reporting chops by following the early pioneers who helped Bitcoin succeed in its early tumultuous days. I learned about the fascinating people who were attracted to the first successful Internet money as well as what the technology meant and how it changed the world.