A Sampling of the Best Cryptocurrency Writing On The Web (Thus Far)

Intro

If you work in the cryptocurrency space, you’re probably used to getting a question of the form, “hey, I keep hearing about X but don’t really understand it, can you send me a link or two to help me out?”, where X, either implicitly or explicitly, equals “Bitcoin,” “Cryptocurrency,” “Blockchain”, or some combination thereof.

Once unpacked, underneath the question usually lies some other covert question, which is some form of one of the following:

How does cryptocurrency work? Why should I care about it? What the hell even is it? Somebody in my personal life is making money off of it and I’m not — how can I rectify this injustice?

And herein lies the problem — all of these questions are perfectly valid, but far too complex, nuanced, and tangled to be answerable by content hyperlinked in a single url. Despite the recent hype-surge, the industry is still young: the smartest minds in the space are still scrambling to make sense of the fundamentals; the canonical textbooks have yet to be written (with perhaps a few exceptions). Given the inherently multidisciplinary nature of crypto, thinking clearly about things requires investigation from multiple different angles at once, and no one source really suffices.

So what I generally tell people to do is to start somewhere basically random, google things, follow links, ask more questions, follow more links, keep reading everything, etc., until eventually you’ll have twenty tabs open, you won’t be able to close one without opening three more, you’ll find yourself neglecting sleep and advisable social obligations, etc, etc. Keep this up for 6–9 months and you may be able to get away with calling yourself an expert.

And while I think this is actually a reasonable answer, it seems to be received as being pretentious and unnecessarily exclusionary, and thus only furthers the divide between the crypto and non-crypto worlds, impedes social cohesion, increases cortisol levels of both parties, etc.

This here post is an attempt to rectify that, and to give myself a link that I can now share in response. It isn’t meant to be at all comprehensive or all-encompassing. The content is deliberately scattershot — it includes technical explanations, historical narratives, philosophical musings, journalistic investigations, and more. The only commonalities are that all are quality writing, all are things I find myself mentally returning to again and again, and most have, relatively speaking, withstood the test of time, which I guess in the hyper-accelerated crypto world means people still reference them at least two weeks after they were written. My only goal here is to spark interest and intrigue, and hopefully give a glimpse into the burgeoning world of cryptocurrency, a bizarre, complex, fascinating, exciting, infuriating, mind boggling world that always seems to somehow be both exploding and imploding right before your eyes.

Also now I get to send one link that’s really ten links, so I still get to still feel a little bit obnoxious and pretentious.

On with it:

The List

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto

Maybe including this is cheating, but I don’t care. Pretty amazing to look back at the founding document a decade after its creation — succinct, to the point, ground-breaking, and — all things considered — fairly humble. In short, the polar opposite of 98% of the whitepapers in the space today. How far we’ve come.

The Ether Thief by Matthew Leising

Knockout, anxiety-inducing narrative of one of the great crypto fiascos — from the hack of the DAO, to the valiant but ultimately unsuccessful vigilante attempt to recover the funds (I won’t spoil why it failed — it’s a doozy), to, finally, the hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain, the legendary, eternally debated, archetypal moral dilemma of blockchain governance.

If there aren’t at least five screenwriters independently trying to adapt this, then Hollywood is officially broken.

Money, blockchains, and Social Scalability by Nick Szabo

Mind expanding essay of which attempting a summary would be futile, so I won’t bother trying. Read it.

The Rise and Fall of the Silk Road by Joshuah Bearman and Tomer Hanuka

Important lessons here:

If you aren’t scared of the FBI, you probably should be. 2) If you’re the mogul of a darknet marketplace, don’t access your server on your personal laptop in a library.

How Does Ethereum Work, Anyway? by Preethi Kasireddy

Preethi does a better job of “popular crypto” technical writing — lucid, plain-English, breaking-down-but-not-dumbing-down of the technical details — than anyone else in the space; in fact, I can’t even think of a close second. More like this please.

The Meaning of Decentralization by Vitalik Buterin

Hard to know which is best to pick from the wunderkind Ethereum inventor, whose posts going back to 2013 read today as shockingly ahead of their time. So let’s just go with this one, where he attempts to unpack a much used term in crypto that desperately needs unpacking.

The State of Cryptocurrency Mining by David Vorick

Dizzyingly thorough deep-dive into the nascent industry of ASIC crypto mining manufacturing. Eye opening as it is alarming, particularly some bits of exposé into the perhaps-not-entirely-unshady business practices of Chinese powerhouse Bitmain. Here’s to hoping we don’t one day look back at this piece as an early warning sign. Knock on wood or whatever.

Basecoin: the worst idea in cryptocurrency, reborn by Preston Byrne

Crypto’s favorite snarky skeptic lays into the much hyped stable coin project, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the challenge of creating a monetary asset of stable value is an incredibly complex, ancient problem that won’t easily be solved by a magic algorithm. Particulars of Basecoin aside, at this point we should all be able to agree that more grandiose blockchain claims could use takedowns like this. A cantankerous tour-de-force.

The Blockchain Man by Taylor Pearson

Okay, this is a weird one, but I like it, and that’s despite not being entirely clear on to what extent it’s supposed to be taken seriously. In any case, worth the price of admission for the “Protocolism is the New Nationalism” section alone.

The Race to Replace Bitcoin by Michael Craig

Ignore the title, which is misleading and dumb; this is the backstory of the development and rivalry between Ripple and Stellar, both of which seek to be cryptocurrencies that operate more on the “institutionally friendly” end of the spectrum. The story has everything one could reasonable ask for in a good soap opera: broken friendships, sex, drugs, shocking amounts of money, and a person who’s moniker begins with “the ‘Yoko Ono’ of.” Also, a good daily reminder that when your protocol is centralized, you take on the old, boring, pre-crypto vulnerabilities: company dissolution and good ole’ fashioned lawsuits.

Enjoy.

For inquiries: daniel@theabacus.io