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The author, David Gerard seems to have some type of agenda against cryptocurrencies at the book's surface; although his criticisms are well cited and quite logical. The link between the blockchain/Bitcoin movement and political views that most of us would reject (e. I'm not sure how Gerard has maintained his sanity, because the hype bubbles he chronicled in the book only grew exponentially worse after it was written. Unless they [= the poor/unbanked] use an exchange, they’d need an expensive computer and a reliable Internet connection to hold and update 120 gigabytes of the blockchain. Even though a lot has happened in the 5 years since the book was written, this is still a very solid primer.
For example, it doesn’t talk at all about privacy coins (Monero / ZCash), Storage Coins (STORJ / Siacoin / Filecoin), social communities with rewards (STEEM), RIPPLE, etc. MyNameIsKaz, a LetsPlayer, if such a title exists, has an amusing economic theory he describes as “vampire dollars”, one which I expect Jack Graham would state simply describes all monetary systems.Two very different candidates are discussed - Dorian Nakamoto, who Newsweek claimed to have discovered was Satoshi, and Craig Wright, who announced he was Satoshi, before conducting a peculiar media circus, and then backtracking and disappearing. it is nothing but a giant international grift, a zero sum game that rewards those able to manage and fund mindless wastage of electricity at the expense of laypeople lured into it to make a quick buck. The humour is a needed counter-weight to the self-importance of most Bitcoiners, but at times it can feel a bit Christopher Hitchens. Using a variety of examples from all types of industries the case is made that while blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies may have some use in the future, the uses that it is currently being promoted for are far from achieving what is promised and probably never will.
The problems that cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin and Litecoin) have had with criminality, fraud, lack of security, volatility, and more recently with capacity. As a Computer Scientist currently working in IT Consulting, I found this book to strike the perfect balance between technical details and specific industry knowledge, very insightful and very well argued. 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. Yet the book is a fun read, packed with memorable history and anecdotes, told with biting sarcasm and wit.
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 an idiosyncratic journalistic beat, just as Attack winds up a fairly idiosyncratic book (the final chapter, ‘Case Study: Why you can’t put the music industry on a blockchain’ feels like it’s largely there based on the author’s wider interests, though it does have a spectacular Imogen Heap anecdote). These facts would have rounded out this section, as well as providing support for a key thesis of the book - that Bitcoin has serious shortcomings, even when judged on its own criteria, such as the overriding importance of decentralized systems. The implicit promise of cyberlibertarianism was the dot-com era promise that you could make it big from a startup company’s Initial Public Offering: build something new and useful, suddenly get rich from it. He's also a frequent poster over at the /r/buttcoin subreddit, which exists to roast cryptocurrencies and, more especially, their zealots.
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