Advocates are very keen on merchant adoption because it spreads Bitcoin’s name in the wider world and makes it look useful. I paid the most attention to crypto in the early days of Bitcoin (as a weird curiosity) and then much more closely over the past few years (as 'oh man I hate this and this is incredibly environmentally and socially corrosive'), and the book filled in a lot of the historical gaps for me. It’s unintentionally funny most of the time and explains things in a dry humor that I really enjoyed.

The chapters on Mt Gox, the Craig Wright affair and Silk Road are particularly entertaining and informative. Even though the book gave me new insights and informed me about some of the history of Bitcoin, it is drained in sarcasm (did make me lol at times). I think perhaps the most incisive critique of the book is of smart contracts, which sound like a clever and useful idea at first blush.David Golumbia’s The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism is a short but very useful academic survey that traces just where the Bitcoin cluster of crank political and economic ideas sprang from. The tone is clearly negative about blockchain and I would advise any reader to crosscheck the information they gather from the book (I have done that and so far everything I have checked has been confirmed. This doesn't go nearly as in-depth as Popper's Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, though it brings a wonderful focus on the vast number of ways that bitcoin fails to live up to its promises, and a better interrogation of what those promises might actually mean. To others, a convenient way to send international payments to drug suppliers without pesky questions from your bank. Hands down the worst piece of garbage I’ve had the utter displeasure of wasting my valuable time with.

The difficulty and risk of bitcoin has all but deep-sixed its small economy of legitimate users, leaving a small number of defiant “HODLers”, convinced that wide adoption is around the corner and things will be better tomorrow.Wer mit Token spekuliert, kann mit der Lektüre immer noch eine Menge Verlust vermeiden: all das Krypto ist manipulierbar und fast alles ist schwer manipuliert.

Replacing trusted central authorities with a hash-cracking consensus algorithm leads to excessive energy consumption, low transactions throughput, unpredictable transaction processing time and high fees. In practice, any keyboard equipped with Ctrl, C, and V keys can fork the coin, defeating the purpose.Sadly, they’re also attractive to scammers: the concept is complicated enough that you can bamboozle laypeople, but not so complicated that you can’t fake the jargon with a little practice.