David Birch's Reading List

"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."

"I think people who are crazy about Bitcoin have an almost religious attitude to it and see it as a kind of revelation. But, of course, the truth is that Bitcoin is part of a much longer evolutionary family tree of electronic cash technologies, which because of my great age, I’ve been involved with for a very long time. What Brunton does very well is to talk about this longer history and context—where did Bitcoin come from? It built on all of these previous developments and came out of a certain context. It talks about the cypherpunk groups and the libertarian ideologies that underpinned these earlier developments. Bitcoin wasn’t something that dropped down from heaven. It’s something that evolved. I find that fascinating and so will readers who are more interested in what it does than how it works. I really like his writing style. It’s a very nicely written book and I enjoyed reading it very much. He’s talking about things like David Chaum’s DigiCash in the 1990s, Adam Back and Hashcash, Bit Gold and these kinds of things. He talks about how different people were building and developing different parts of it. It’s a bit like the steam engine story. Somebody had a steam engine, then someone else invented a condenser and then somebody else invented a governor and, all of a sudden, you had steam engines that could do a hundred miles an hour. It’s that sort of story he’s telling. He talks about this idea of the Wild West. People in that community talk about this world of Bitcoin being the Wild West, but they have a very romanticized and essentially fictional image of what the Wild West was. After all, if the Wild West was all that they say it was, we would still be in it. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t very good. That’s why we don’t have it anymore. Uncharitable people might see it as a sort of teenage, angry-white-male pseudo-libertarianism. It’s not real political libertarianism. It’s more a mom-won’t-let-me-buy-a-PlayStation sort of libertarianism. Anyway, it’s a very good book about the fact that this is an evolutionary tree, which by implication, will continue to evolve. I think you’d be hard-pressed to persuade me that Bitcoin has been mainstreamed. You might be able to persuade me that publicity about Bitcoin has been mainstreamed. But the number of people that hold Bitcoin is still small. I think most Bitcoins are still held by ‘whales’, as they call them. It’s a very thin and opaque market that’s subject to transparent manipulation. And most holdings are utterly speculative. Nobody actually uses Bitcoin for anything. That’s why Brunton’s view of it as part of a growing and evolving phenomenon, which will continue to evolve, is appealing to me. No, I don’t think it does. It’s probably like the Newcomen steam engine that was used for pumping water out of Cornish mines. It was a first, it was hopelessly inefficient, but it was the only way of doing some particular thing, so the inefficiency was tolerated. But you didn’t put a Newcomen steam engine on wheels to create the Flying Scotsman, you carried on evolving the technology and I think that’s what will happen."

"This is one of my absolutely favourite books. Many years ago, when I worked on Mondex in Swindon, I very quickly realized, being an intelligent person, that actually this whole money thing was much more interesting than I’d realized. And, what’s more, as soon as you’re forced to sit down and write some computer code for it you realize nobody understands it. So, I wanted to understand a bit more about it and its history. And I went out and bought this book and it is just wonderful. I read it like a novel , wanting to know what’s going to happen next. I love the whole thing. It’s beautifully written and really interesting. There are many others I could point to now. There’s Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Cash . There’s Money Changes Everything by William Goetzmann. But this one still holds its own. When I was younger, I organised a conference about digital money. And I called up Glyn Davies, who didn’t know me from Adam, and asked if he would come and give a talk to set the historical context. He very kindly came along and delivered a fabulous talk about the history of money. I just love that book. It’s terrific. He is sadly no longer with us. It was first published in 1994. Yes. The overarching theme of it is that every innovation in the history of money has served to lessen centralized control. And the last great evolution involved the settlement between the monarch and the merchant classes, which led to central banking and national currencies and all that sort of thing. And that’s the future. Future technological developments will continue to lessen central control. I think you can make the argument that it has already happened. The question is whether it is going to be decentralized yet further and the answer to that, I think, is probably ‘yes’. In any case, I don’t think you can think about the future of money if you don’t understand where it came from and how it has worked in the past. And Davies is great in providing that perspective."

"I thought I should probably include something that covers technical details. This book is very clear. It’s a good place to start for an intelligent non-technical reader and I thought I should include one book like that. It’s a couple of years old. It’s written with some useful perspective about how things have actually evolved and developed. The one I’m working on at the moment is called Will Robots Need Passports? It’s about digital identity. My obsessions are digital money and digital identity. Having just done a couple of books about digital money, I’m now writing a book about digital identity. I thought it would be an interesting angle to talk about how, despite the fact we haven’t actually fixed the identity problem for people, there’s already a much bigger problem coming in relation to things. We’re going to be connecting vastly more things to the internet than people and we don’t know what any of those are either. That’s part of it. By ‘things’ I mean that quite generically. It’s also linked to issues about artificial intelligence. At one level, there’s the trivial question of how do I give your car permission to park in my garage. That sounds very easy when futurists put it up on a PowerPoint slide and say, ‘Well one day your car will be able to negotiate its own car parking.’ That is true, but when you drop down one level of detail, there’s absolutely nothing there. How on earth do you know it’s my car? How did you know it was allowed to park there? How do you know that I gave my car permission to park in the garage? Etc., etc. But things are also going to be made vastly worse by the arrival of artificial intelligence . For instance, if I see something on Twitter, how can I know it even came from a person, let alone which person it came from? I’ve just got off a call with the Tony Blair Institute—I didn’t even know there was such a thing. They were calling me about government policy on identity. I had to break it to them gently that there isn’t one, which I think was a little disappointing to them. The point is that we’re in enough trouble as it is, because we haven’t figured out how to manage people’s identities online and we’re about to put billions more things online, as well. I thought that would be a fun idea for a book."