Here are 46 books that Proof Of Stake fans have personally recommended if you like
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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.
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.
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…
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…
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.
Like The Departed or No Country For Old Men, Andy Greenberg’s book is a cat-and-mouse thriller in which tireless law enforcement officials chase shrewd criminals across the globe, eventually revealing the horrifying human toll left in their wake.
The cryptocurrency industry isn’t synonymous with crime, but it has facilitated vast amounts of illegal activity. Greenberg, however, shows that the unique qualities of the blockchain have also made it shockingly easy for the feds to chase down their targets.
From the award-winning author of Sandworm comes the propulsive story of a new breed of investigators who have cracked the Bitcoin blockchain, exposing once-anonymous realms of money, drugs, and violence. “I love the book… It reads like a thriller… These stories are amazing.” (Michael Lewis)
Over the last decade, a single innovation has massively fueled digital black markets: cryptocurrency. Crime lords inhabiting lawless corners of the internet have operated more freely—whether in drug dealing, money laundering, or human trafficking—than their analog counterparts could have ever dreamed of. By transacting not in dollars or pounds but in currencies with anonymous ledgers,…
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.
Capitalism is a saga of booms and busts, and few tell the story with as much vim and rigor as the historian Edward Chancellor. Across centuries of hype cycles, Chancellor shows why entire cultures get sucked into brazen schemes promising riches and utopia.
Some of those schemes help facilitate the rise of genuinely revolutionary technologies, like the steam engine. And others go absolutely nowhere and end up destroying the lives of their many investors.
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.
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…
Written with the verve of such works as The Big Short, The History of the Future, and The Spider Network, here is the fascinating, true story of the rise of Ethereum, the second-biggest digital asset in the world, the growth of cryptocurrency, and the future of the internet as we know it.
Everyone has heard of Bitcoin, but few know about the second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, which has been heralded as the "next internet."
The story of Ethereum begins with Vitalik Buterin, a supremely gifted nineteen-year-old autodidact who saw the promise of blockchain when the technology was in its earliest…
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.
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.
In their short history, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have gone through booms, busts, and internecine wars, recently reaching a market valuation of more than $2 trillion. The central promise of crypto endures-vast fortunes made from decentralized networks not controlled by any single entity and not yet regulated by many governments.
The recent growth of crypto would have been all but impossible if not for a brilliant young man named Vitalik Buterin and his creation: Ethereum. In this book, Laura Shin takes readers inside the founding of this novel cryptocurrency network, which enabled users to launch their own new coins, thus…
I am the primary writer and podcaster behind The Blockchain Socialist, a platform for exploring the intersection of crypto and left politics. I’ve published over 35 blogs for my website and on the web3 native blogging platform Mirror as well as for outlets like FWB and Outland Magazine. I’ve also recorded over 150 podcasts which included incredible guests with a wide ranging spectrum of political views and expertises like Vitalik Buterin, Cory Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Srnicek, Lawrence Lessig, and many more. And I don’t just talk about but I do it as I am also a co-founder of Breadchain Cooperative where we make blockchain applications from a post-capitalist perspective.
The Ethereum blockchain ecosystem is arguably the largest and likely to keep that position for the time being therefore making it an important technology to have a firm grasp and understanding of. This includes not just the hard technical aspects of it, but also its history and culture.
Dr. Dylan-Ellis has been involved in the Ethereum ecosystem and teaching cryptocurrency courses at the University College Dublin, and as someone who has similarly been involved in the Ethereum space for so long and watching its political and cultural evolution, this textbook offers a good intro for anyone wanting to get up to speed on Ethereum.
Absolute Essentials of Ethereum is a concise textbook which guides the reader through the fascinating world of the emerging Ethereum ecosystem, from the basics of how its blockchain works to cutting-edge applications.
Written by an experienced educator, each chapter is designed to progress potential students from class to class. Technical concepts are clearly explained for those new to the topic and readers are supported with definitions and summaries in each chapter. Real-life case studies situate the overviews in a contemporary context. Topics covered include the Ethereum Execution and Consensus layers, Ethereum governance and community, Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs), Decentralised Finance…
I believed the Internet would be as colorful a cultural phenomenon as LSD. But before I was even able to convince people that something wonderful was on the horizon, big business swooped in and recontextualized the digital renaissance as a business revolution and the Silicon Valley mindset was born: Companies should grow exponentially forever! Any tech problem can be solved with more tech! Humans on Earth are just larvae–maggots–while wealthy tech bros will get to Mars or upload their minds to the cloud. This list of books is meant to show how these guys think and why they’re taking us in the wrong direction.
This book is about the ultimate pyramid scheme, written largely from the perspective of someone who fell for it. Michael Lewis tells a story like nobody else. It is about Sam Bankman Fried, the crypto billionaire who is now in jail for defrauding everybody.
Only it was written before Fried was convicted, and some reviewers felt Lewis had himself been charmed and hoodwinked by Fried. But that’s precisely the reason I love this book: the author falls under the spell of a Silicon Valley accelerationist and techno-utopian.
We get to experience the logic of “effective altruism” and the cult of exponential growth from the inside rather than the cynicism of how it all turned out.
When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world's youngest billionaire and crypto's Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side?
In Going Infinite Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system.…
I am the primary writer and podcaster behind The Blockchain Socialist, a platform for exploring the intersection of crypto and left politics. I’ve published over 35 blogs for my website and on the web3 native blogging platform Mirror as well as for outlets like FWB and Outland Magazine. I’ve also recorded over 150 podcasts which included incredible guests with a wide ranging spectrum of political views and expertises like Vitalik Buterin, Cory Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Srnicek, Lawrence Lessig, and many more. And I don’t just talk about but I do it as I am also a co-founder of Breadchain Cooperative where we make blockchain applications from a post-capitalist perspective.
When I first entered the crypto space, I found that one of the biggest issues was the dominance of free market fundamentalist ideology even when trying to learn about things completely technical. I desperately searched for writing that aligned more with my political leanings, and this book was the first one I found.
In the book, Mark argues that the significance of cryptocurrencies goes well beyond cryptoanarchism. In so far as they allow us "to appropriate, collectively, the means of monetary production," to paraphrase Marx, and to replace "the government of persons by the administration of things," as Engels advocated, they form the basis for a political regime that begins to look like a communism which has, at last, come to fruition–a cryptocommunism.
Cryptocurrencies are often associated with right-wing political movements, or even with the alt-right. They are the preserve of libertarians and fans of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. With their promotion of anonymity and individualism, there's no doubt that they seamlessly slot into the prevailing anti-State ideology. But in this book Mark Alizart argues that the significance of cryptocurrencies goes well beyond cryptoanarchism. In so far as they allow us 'to appropriate collectively the means of monetary production', to paraphrase Marx, and to replace 'the government of persons by the administration of things', as Engels advocated, they form the basis for…
I inherited a love of puzzles from my mother, and we still share crossword clues, looking for answers. I also shared her love of reading mysteries and trying to solve crimes, from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew to Agatha Christie and Sue Grafton. So, when I started writing, it was only natural that I create my own literary puzzles. Add in an ingrained sense of justice–so often missed in society–and I love it when the bad guy (or gal) gets their comeuppance. I also love the mental workout I get when I need focused logic to puzzle out the ending before the final pages.
I’m not usually a fan of dystopia, but Doctorow created an immersive, just-enough-in-the-future-to-be-believable world and filled it with compelling, conflicted characters. The protagonist, Martin Hench, is a self-employed forensic accountant (read: hacker!) with high-end computer skills.
While navigating an increasingly hostile environment–including a spell in a homeless camp–Hench digs into dark-web cryptocurrency and the shadowy figures who mine it, upsetting some powerfully dangerous people along the way. Hacking at its finest!
This bookkept me guessing all the way to the end, and that doesn’t happen often these days. I’ve read so many mysteries over the years that it’s hard to fool me, but Doctorow manages and then some.
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's Red Team Blues is a grabby next-Tuesday thriller about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works.
Martin Hench is sixty-seven years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He’s a―contain your excitement―self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long war between people who want to hide their money and people who want to find it. He knows the ins and outs of financial records that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a…
