Here are 53 books that Digital Gold fans have personally recommended if you like
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My father was a NASA scientist during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, so while most people knew the Space Race as a spectacle of thundering rockets and grainy lunar footage, I remember the very human costs and excitement of scientific progress. My space-cadet years come in snippets–the emotional break in my dad’s voice when Neil Armstrong hopped around the Moon; the strange peace I felt as I bobbed on a surfboard and watched another Saturn 1b flame into the sky. Later, as a journalist and author, I would see that such moments are couched in societal waves as profound and mysterious as the wheeling of hundreds of starlings overhead.
Though not a volume pertaining to “hard science,” Mackay’s book is an early and essential inquiry into “group psychology” long before the phrase was coined. I used this and Kuhn’s books as background when writing World on Fire.
Why do perfectly respectable people act against their own self-interests, often violently, I wondered, when drawn into the seductive folds of a crowd? Mackay wrote his first edition in 1841, just a few decades after the convulsions that swallowed up Priestley and Lavoisier, then updated it in 1852: he chronicled the spreading group madness of such historical phenomena as the South Sea Bubble, “alchymists,” the Crusades, witch manias, and the “popular admiration of great thieves.”
Mackay’s 1852 preface crystallized his theme with the question: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds while they only recover their senses slowly and one…
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.
I've always had a creative curiosity that involves making, designing, and finding creative solutions to problems, this led me to using digital tools and lecturing in interactive media. As technology, society, and design have developed so to has my knowledge and experience in these fields enabling me to understand and develop the unique skills that are required to create successful solutions in the digital design process. I do this through creating and designing interventions in the physical space to ask questions and raise awareness of our use of technology and the impact on our awareness of time and space and the world around us.
Marshall McLuhan, in his book The Medium Is the Massage, introduces the idea that "all media are extensions of some human faculty... The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye... clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system." All of this, McLuhan says, alters the way that we see the world around us and how we interact with it.
This is a must-read for all who work with or study media as it makes the reader question the very medium that we use to interact with each other and see how this impacts how we interpret and experience the world around us. This is vital to beginning to understand how to utilise the medium that you are working with.
In a dazzling fusion of Quentin Fiore's bold and inventive graphic design and Marshall McLuhan's unique insight into technology, advertising and mass-media, The Medium is the Massage is a unique study of human communication in the twentieth century, published in Penguin Modern Classics
Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all-pervasive rise of modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960 classic The Medium is the Massage illustrates how the growth of technology utterly reshapes society, personal lives and sensory perceptions, so that we are effectively transformed by the means we use to communicate. His theories, many…
I am a writer and reporter who has spent two decades covering complicated topics for a wide audience. This started when I covered Wall Street for Bloomberg News, where I spent 17 years as a reporter, and continues to this day with my own crypto media company, DeCential Media. My love of distilling new technologies to their essence is what informs the best of my writing and comes with the added bonus of being able to interview and learn from some of the smartest people in tech and finance.
Lessig lays out his vision for how the Internet should and should not be regulated in easy-to-understand prose that belies a powerful ideology. This book really helped me frame in my own book how new technologies, like the Internet, are approached by regulators and governments. The idea that code cannot be owned, lest it be manipulated, as Lessig states, unlocked a way for me to think and write about how blockchain should be approached as well.
There's a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated-that it is, in its very essence, immune from the government's (or anyone else's) control. Code , first published in 2000, argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable cyberspace has no nature." It only has code-the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is. That code can create a place of freedom-as the original architecture of the Net did-or a place of oppressive control. Under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming a highly regulable space, where behaviour is much more…
I am a writer and reporter who has spent two decades covering complicated topics for a wide audience. This started when I covered Wall Street for Bloomberg News, where I spent 17 years as a reporter, and continues to this day with my own crypto media company, DeCential Media. My love of distilling new technologies to their essence is what informs the best of my writing and comes with the added bonus of being able to interview and learn from some of the smartest people in tech and finance.
This is my favorite book about the financial crisis of 2008. Richard had unparalleled access to Bill Ackman, one of the savviest investors around, and tells this story with amazing detail and insight. Everyone knows The Big Short, but Confidence Game is the book to read to really understand what created the credit crisis of 2008.
An expose on the delusion, greed, and arrogance that led to America's credit crisis The collapse of America's credit markets in 2008 is quite possibly the biggest financial disaster in U.S. history. Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff is the story of Bill Ackman's six-year campaign to warn that the $2.5 trillion bond insurance business was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Branded a fraud by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and investigated by Eliot Spitzer and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ackman later made his investors more than $1 billion when bond…
I am a writer and reporter who has spent two decades covering complicated topics for a wide audience. This started when I covered Wall Street for Bloomberg News, where I spent 17 years as a reporter, and continues to this day with my own crypto media company, DeCential Media. My love of distilling new technologies to their essence is what informs the best of my writing and comes with the added bonus of being able to interview and learn from some of the smartest people in tech and finance.
Critical Path is a tour de force of structured thought that tackles some of the biggest problems facing humanity. R. Buckminster Fuller is one of the most lucid thinkers of the 20th Century who writes with inimitable style. Absorbing his work helped me to distill the issues facing the 21st century that blockchain technology and decentralized systems are trying to solve.
Critical Path is R. Buckminster Fuller's masterwork - the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern - as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication over 20 years ago. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation - at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises. Fuller's analysis has been proven correct in many areas since then and his options for the survival of mankind are as compelling as ever. Critical Path is an essential text for any student of humanity.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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…
Crypto’s rollercoaster journey has given rise to some of the most thrilling real-life tales of the last two decades. These tales teem with personal drama and reveal much larger truths: about our fractured global moment, about the ripple effects of well-intentioned technological systems, and about the massive divide between how we want society to function and how it actually does.
As much as some people wish it dead, crypto is not going away any time soon. Many of its followers have adopted a religious-like belief that it will transform humanity and bring unlimited wealth to its followers; others simply believe it to be a good investment. Their collective trust in these strange digital currencies means that crypto will continue to shape the world in unpredictable ways.
This book is not about crypto at all, but it does ask and answer complex questions about the very nature of value, which are central to understanding why crypto is now worth as much as it is. The economist Don Thompson takes on this question through the lens of the art world, examining why some pieces of canvas garner so much more attention and fame than others.
Through his reporting, Thompson reveals a self-serving, crime-adjacent industry that has convinced itself of its value to the world, but it is too often a glinting hall of mirrors. Sound familiar?
Why would a smart New York investment banker pay $12 million for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock's drip painting No. 5, 1948 sell for $140 million?
Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular…
I’ve been writing about cryptocurrency since 2015, and full-time since 2017. I’ve worked for the biggest crypto news site in the world, CoinDesk, but now I write about it every day for a more mainstream audience. Cryptocurrency fits at a nexus at the kind of things I’m drawn to: It’s technological, it’s economic and it freaks people out. Unlike a lot of people who write about crypto, I’ve actually played around with the stuff. I’m not an investor, but I have used it. Using it is really the only way anyone gets to the point of grokking it, and I grok the stuff.
I’ve never read a non-fiction book that felt so much like a novel as American Kingpin. The book absolutely bounds from event to event.
It presents a solid cast of law enforcement misfits who all get sucked into chasing down the people behind The Silk Road website that’s giving so many people access to illicit drugs, and it details all the quirky little mistakes that The Dread Pirate Roberts made on his way to getting arrested.
This is crucial to bitcoin history, like it or not, because The Silk Road was the first marketplace where there was real demand for paying in bitcoin.
This book isn’t going to really help anyone develop a deeper understanding of cryptocurrency, but it will help them understand something that’s endemic in the scene: ideologues who gets sucked into a way of thinking and take it much too far.
The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom - and almost got away with it.
In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything - drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons - free of the government's watchful eye. While the federal government were undertaking an epic two-year manhunt for the site's elusive proprietor, the Silk Road quickly ballooned into a $1.2 billion enterprise.…
