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yuga.eth
@yuga
Book Review: The Genesis Book by Aaron Van Wirdum TLDR - A must-read for crypto enthusiasts, but falls short of having impact beyond that. The Genesis Book is unique among books on crypto in that it focuses on the precursors to Bitcoin rather than Bitcoin itself. It attempts to document the disparate intellectual traditions that eventually merged into the first cryptocurrency. The Austrian school of economics (with a heavy emphasis on Friedrich Hayek), the Free Software/Open Source movement, the advent of Cryptography, and the Cypherpunk/Extropian movements are among those extensively covered by Van Wirdum. (cont.)
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yuga.eth
@yuga
The book will prove extremely valuable for crypto enthusiasts for combining these strands into a single narrative. One of the challenges of crypto is the breadth of expertise it requires across different subjects, and Van Wirdum does a commendable job covering all of them with reasonable fidelity. It is also the only account I have read that adeptly summarizes the attempts to create digital money on the Cypherpunks mailing list before Bitcoin: Hashcash by Adam Back, b-money by Wei Dai, and so on. The story that emerges is one of constant, progressive evolution, with each cypherpunk improving upon the protocol of the previous one by piecing together various existing elements: blind signing, Proof of Work, hashed timestamps, and difficulty adjustment all coming together to reach the logical endpoint that Satoshi Nakamoto eventually proposed.
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yuga.eth
@yuga
The Genesis Book nevertheless suffers from at least two flaws that will constrain its overall impact. The first is its overemphasis on Hayekian economics as not just a historical background of Bitcoin but as a moral valence in and of itself. The author's biases are evident throughout the book. Rather than dispassionately comparing and contrasting the current central bank-based regime to a theoretical Hayekian alternative, Van Wirdum makes normative claims about the superiority of Bitcoin without steelmanning its weaknesses. Van Wirdum's commitment to the cause of Bitcoin seeps through every sentence, infusing the book with a sanctimoniousness that will turn off readers who are not already interested in cryptocurrencies.
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