I started learning about Bitcoin in September 2016. It’s been a consistent topic of interest for me ever since. Below is a brain dump of various resources, thoughts, quotes, etc. related to the topic. These mostly came from notes on my phone or Twitter drafts and I wanted to start accumulating them in one place. Again these notes are as much for me as they are for you, but if you decide to look at this stuff hopefully you come away with something useful.

Books

  • Inventing Bitcoin: The Technology Behind the First Truly Scarce and Decentralized Money Explained by Yan Pritzker

    This book is absolutely fantastic if you find yourself curious about what Bitcoin actually is. I love how it touches on the technology as well as some of the game theory and incentivization structures behind it. It is great for folks new to the space, is a quick read, and does not require more than a high school education to understand. This is one of the first resources I recommend to me when people reach out for suggestions.

  • The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg

    It took me roughly two years to go through this entire book cover to cover. But holy shit was it worth the time spent. This book perfectly captures the ethos of the entire space. The fact that this book was published in 1997 completely blows my mind. The authors do a great job of digging deep into historical patterns and using what they find to make strikingly accurate predictions about the future in regards to technology. This is a slow read but you won’t be able to believe how often you find yourself thinking about Bitcoin while reading it despite it being published more than two decades before Satoshi’s whitepaper.

  • The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

    I’m in the middle of reading this one right now and am really enjoying it. I don’t know if I would have been ready to read this upon first entering the space. I’m glad I have some good baseline knowledge going into. There’s been tons of noteworthy stuff already in the first few chapters - this is a great “yellow highlighter while you read” book.

Articles

  • Shelling Out, by Nick Szabo

    Before my exposure to Bitcoin I really had not spent much time or energy thinking about money - what is it, what makes it valuable, where did it come from. Those are all super important questions that are often neglected. Shelling Out does a great job providing a history of money and wealth.

  • Bitcoin is Common Sense, by Parker Lewis

    When I first tweeted this article out my commentary was:

    “This is one of the best Bitcoin posts I’ve read. It’s topical, informative, and well-written. Best of all you don’t need any prior knowledge to read it, just curiosity. If you don’t have 20 minutes now you should bookmark it and set aside 20 minutes later”

    Point still stands.

Quotes

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”

- Thomas Jefferson

“The status quo has a tendency of being defended, regardless of merit, merely by its anchoring in time to the way things have always been.”

- Parker Lewis (Bitcoin is Common Sense)

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

- Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Miscellaneous Notes

Properties of strong money:

  • Scarce
  • Easily divisible
  • Easy to send
  • Relatively cheap to send

Three stages of currency: Collectible -> Store of Value -> Medium of Exchange