The best books on cryptocurrency

Being in the crypto space for as long as I have, I’ve heard the argument repeatedly that tokenization is a new thing that blockchains enable and that they are inherently good or bad, depending on where you stand on the issue. But that is an oversimplification.

Rachel O'Dwyer's book is an approachable exploration of the evolving landscape of tokens beyond the usual critique of financialization. Through a first-person exploration of history, O'Dwyer reveals the deeply political nature of tokens, shedding light on their enduring presence and demonstrating how today's digital tokens are simply a continuation of humanity's longstanding use of tokens to facilitate a wide range of social processes since antiquity.

Although David is a friend, I only recommend his book because it’s great, both in terms of content and presentation. Real-World Cryptography is today’s reference book about cryptographic tools and applications: Modern schemes such as the SHA-3 hash function and the Noise protocol framework, end-to-end encryption protocols, cryptocurrencies’ cryptography mechanisms, as well as emerging techniques like fully-homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation; Wong’s book delivers a practice-oriented, accessible introduction, enriched by many visual illustrations (including original comics strips!), and exercises (with their solutions). 

First of all, I love everything Michael Lewis writes. But this might be his most engaging book yet. Told through the lens of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, this is an incredible story.

It’s a story that combines genius, brilliance, folly, technology, and crime that left me wondering whether SBF really did something terrible, or just got desperately unlucky. It guided me through Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial, its aftermath, and the bankruptcy of FTX with a part harsh judgment and part huge empathy.

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.

Well, the author is a friend of mine but it’s also on a topic close to my own academic research interests. So it was kind of compulsory reading for me, but it might be the most enjoyable compulsory reading I’ve ever done.

I thought NFTs were just a gimmick to do with internet pictures. But the authors explain, with great examples, that NFTs are best thought of as a new technology for creating digital assets. And better still, providing the true owner with irrefutable proof of ownership of these digital assets.

What I took away was that NFTs are a new technology for tracking property rights. And since property rights have been fundamental to economic development for millennia, this is a topic one can’t afford not to understand.

Many people have heard of Bitcoin’s “proof of work” (POW) consensus protocol which involves using huge amounts of energy to solve cryptographic problems. Some of us have also heard of “proof of stake”, an alternative to POW now used by the second largest cryptocurrency, Ether. What Joshua’s book taught me was the similarities and linkages between these two different ways of running a blockchain.

By focusing on the economics, not just the technology, of different consensus protocols, we learn about fundamental issues like the “cost of computational trust”, the future of consensus protocols, and indeed the future of cryptocurrencies.

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.

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. 

Sometimes the obvious pick is still the right pick, and anyone interested in the history of financial shenanigans – outright frauds or merely weapons-grade idiocy – has to read Kindleberger.

There’s a reason why it remains a stone-cold classic that bears reading (and re-reading) almost half a century after it was first published. 

So this book only has one chapter on cryptocurrency (and it dismisses it), but it’s still a worthwhile addition to this list, and here’s why:

Money does a great job showing readers what a protean thing money really is and has always been. Every time money is about to make a giant change in human history, people think that change is completely crazy and will never work. And then it happens, and before long people seem to believe that money could have never worked any other way.

Does it sound relevant now?

While Goldstein eloquently explains and then dismisses Bitcoin in these pages (in fact, it’s one of the best dismissals I’ve ever read), it’s still a worthy entry for anyone who wants to wrap their heads around why so many people have invested so much in fundamentally changing how money works here in the 21st Century.

Once you know… show more.