42 books like Money

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 through the people who have taken Bitcoin from The Silk Road out onto main street.

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. 

This is a great read for… show more.

The Infinite Machine is the beach-read Ethereum book.

Ethereum is the second-largest blockchain out there. It’s the one that’s sometimes referred to as The World Computer, because it can function like an actual computer, but no one owns it. Thousands of people are running it.

If that sounds very abstract and weird, well: it is. Cami Russo walks readers through how that functionality got used in the early days, plus a couple of the really big screw-ups made with this complex global machine. 

It’s a fun book, for as abstract as it all is. She manages to go out and find a bunch of the relevant characters from those early events and bring them to life. 

Most of the talk about cryptocurrency in the mainstream is about Bitcoin, but, the truth is, most of the activity that drives that conversation happens on Ethereum. If you want to understand the weird… show more.

The Cryptopians covers basically the same ground as The Infinite Machine, but in much, much more detail. 

Shin very much sets out to dig the skeletons out of the closet from the earliest days of the Ethereum adventure. 

The thing you have to understand about how Ethereum started is this: A 19-year-old gawky immigrant kid who was completely conflict averse came up with the vision. A bunch of moderately rich guys and hacker types heard his ideas and saw money start to burst out of their eyeballs. They all moved into a house together and tried to build it and a lot of personal rivalries and drama ensued. 

Then there were a couple of gigantic early screw-ups that nearly sank the whole thing. 

Shin goes through it all blow by blow. There are a lot of “he said/she said” sort of moments in the book.

One of the wildest things… show more.

I love the way this book makes the very old story of the French Revolution new and exciting by telling the parallel story of how so much of the turmoil of that period was etched onto the money that a succession of governments issued.

I learned so much, both from the shifting set of images on French money and the wonderful stories about how a confused populace used this money to the best of their ability, as their paper currency lost both the crowned heads that once adorned it and, in the process, much of its value. Spang ingeniously recounts the revolutionaries’ efforts to paper over a failing revolution with vacuous promises to pay. 

Most money books are full of get-rich-quick schemes and bad advice. This one goes to the root of why we make good or bad financial decisions.

I have a tendency to overlook the business side of writing, and this book helped me see why that might be and do something about it. Everyone has strong feelings about money: this book helped me get mine under control and in perspective, which enables me to write better and publish the books I want to publish.

God and Money is primarily a guide to giving. Still, it is also a testimony of how the authors, while attending Harvard, became conflicted about their extravagant lifestyles and convicted of the need to give more. In other words, something enjoyable and unique about the book is that the authors discuss finances, but it is also their story.

They also use modern-day case studies and practical ways to apply the Bible’s teaching. They followed up with True Riches, pride to gratitude, coveting to content, anxiety to trust, and indifference to love are the chapter topics.

This book – a copy is free at hathitrust.org – shows how some truths about money are eternal. 

It is the first personal finance guide written for women but its advice is still valid – ‘high interest is another name for bad security’ ‘Do not put all your money into one concern’ ‘the Broker [you employ] should be of high standing and respectability’ ‘place the money…in the bank at interest [or] put it into the Funds’. And it is a model of clear writing. I loved it.

I believe Landsburg, whom I have met, may be one of the most creative and interesting thinkers in America today.

I love this book because it is his personality on every page: quirky, creative, and entertaining. It asks and answers questions others have never even considered or incorrectly assumed are so obvious as to not be worth the time to explore. I use questions from this book, which is 30+ years old, to stump and pique the curiosity of my students every semester.

If you want to know why money laundering is so appealing, in this book, you will find out why. The author, through his experience as an investigator, includes a chapter on the motivations that lead people to get involved in money laundering. It helped me a lot to understand why people do it; maybe you get surprised like I did. He also includes different mechanisms with which criminals move money and intertwines the relationship between fraud and money laundering, giving a useful perspective to minimize these risks in any company.