The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order

"This book is excited about the new technology. They’re journalists and it’s very well written. It’s a very nice read and, even though I knew a lot of the things in it, I actually enjoyed reading it as part of this bigger overall narrative. It’s a very nice introductory book. If you read books by the crazy Bitcoin people, you don’t get that bigger narrative. This book stands up well and, if you want to an introduction, it’s a good place to start. Yes. Absolutely. The story they’re telling is that this is a genuinely new thing. This isn’t progress in the sense of putting a Band-Aid on credit cards, so that you can use them to hold hotel reservations. This is a genuinely new way of doing things. And actually, I think they’re right. It was a genuinely new thing. It touches on the relationship between the global financial crisis and cryptocurrency, which I think is interesting. They’re a little breathless about the blockchain , but that’s okay. I suppose I would see Bitcoin as much more of a protest movement now than I did when I was reading this book originally in 2016. They talk quite a bit about the mistrust of the financial systems. I think some of that idealism is gone now. They say that financial markets are especially ripe for Blockchain innovation, the idea that, in the long run, the most innovative part of it might be the smart contract stuff that you run on top of it, rather than the underlying currency. I think that’s probably true. It tells that story quite nicely. In short, I think that, if you don’t know much about the topic and you want to know a little bit about what this Bitcoin thing is all about, this is a nice book to start with."