Bitcoin itself, as an ideology fundamentally at odds with reality based on a technology that reached its limits in 2015, will keep lurching from crisis to crisis. The next two chapters cover the state of Bitcoin use in 2017 - first as a payment mechanism and as a financial instrument to be traded on the markets. It's remarkable that we're where we're at when so many of these things have been blindingly, obviously bogus the entire time.

The mysterious inventor of bitcoin-- and those who have pretended to be him-- was also interesting, and so were all the tales of bitcoin hucksters, including the guy who kept a list of his crimes on his computer in a .This book is a good look at some of the weirdest things about Bitcoin, Ethereum and the nebulous "blockchain technologies", and offers a decent enough look on what exactly is wrong with Bitcoin and why it really shouldn't be used for anything substantial and why some people insist on doing so. One Chinese “ICO” broke new barriers in market efficiency: you didn’t even need to put your ether into it yourself!

org is a corporate open source Potemkin village of the sort IBM has long favoured: the illusion of an open project, with no “there” there. He's also a frequent poster over at the /r/buttcoin subreddit, which exists to roast cryptocurrencies and, more especially, their zealots. I suppose there is some inherent confirmation bias in liking this book because it puts into words what I have more or less suspected about crypto. Again, this treatment already seems outmoded - especially given the meteoric rise in popularity of ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings).What you’ve got is a Bitcoin address (like a bank account number) and the key to that address (another number, which works like the PIN to the first number).

But in that light, the extensive source list in this book is probably going to be valuable if you've never heard of the funny stuff and want to go digging further. As a disclaimer, it is obvious that the author is very pessimistic about the blockchain hype and its future use. But Gerard’s book is a general-audiences primer, not an in-depth history, and as such it’s extremely solid.

Zeitungsartikel über blockchain und bitcoin helfen nicht weiter, da sie nur das Immergesagte nachplappern. These chapters also define some of the fringe concepts that have acquired common parlance within the Bitcoin community, but which may be unfamiliar to newcomers. Excellent short book on the investment value and political Implications of current digital currency.

I'm not sure some of the unrelated details of the past of some of the participants are as relevant as the book makes them, but the amount of issues exposed around the crypto ecosystem makes the read with it anyway. Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain has all the information you need not to throw your money into the blockchain bubble, or at least to be very cautious if you do. However, the final few months of the year produced large rises, and larger volatility, in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Ten years after the Satoshi Nakamoto paper, and after five years of loud media hype, cryptocurrency has few visible uses except as an asset (and perhaps it’s already time to remove “except as an asset” from that sentence). As the only people who deal exclusively in bitcoin are drug dealers, arms dealers, child pornographers, human traffickers, and currency prospectors, I figure it’s a safe comparison.Full disclosure, I hew towards the later definition although I can see how the 2nd camp can also claim some support.