Four Books To Better Understand How Cryptocurrency Works

When we look at new technologies, our natural tendency is to project them onto the same paradigm we understand right now.

When media companies looked at the internet, they initially assumed that it would just be another way for people to read the same content.

And, indeed, the first media sites online looked much like their print counterparts. Yahoo!’s homepage in the 90’s was not unlike the front page of a newspaper: it had banner ads across the top, a few featured stories and links to other stories.

However, the Media companies who won the internet look very different from those that preceded it: Google, Facebook and
Twitter have scrolling feeds, not static pages. They have feed ads instead of banner ads and everyone’s “home page” is personalized to them.

These differences reverberate down into their business model and organizational structure. They have no editorial staff and generate no content.

Few saw this coming.

Fred Pohl captured what good prediction should do with his line about science fiction: “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

Good prediction is the same. It should see not only the first order effects (the automobile) but predict the second and third order effects (traffic jams) which come later.

I have been thinking about what the traffic jam effects of cryptocurrency will be.

Cryptocurrency predictions seem particularly difficult to make because the technology lies at the intersection of fields as diverse as politics, economics, cryptography and computer science.

Individuals with a background in one field may understand some of the initial the economic implications but are blind to others.

(Here are the four books I’ve read so far that have most helped me understand what some of the traffic jam effects of cryptocurrency may be.)[https://medium.com/the-mission/four-books-to-better-understand-how-cryptocurrency-works-bafd65a1bce6]