I started writing a long-ass comment on @avbpod's post, but instead of a comment we might as well have a standalone post. (will zap him a portion of what this post gets zapped.)
The substack linked ("Bitcoin books are a sham," by Alles Voor Bitcoin) is a lengthy and pretty sour take on Bitcoin books. They're all the same; it's all been said; it's all endless repetition of the same things. I sometimes say that I have the best bookshelf in Bitcoin, so I'll have if not a view then at least a reasonable insight.
Deep inhale.
So, this is both insightful and incredibly silly ("knock me over with a feather!").
First: Same in Fiatland
Walk up and down a bookstore, or look through a segment of a shelf with newly published books (in whichever field you know anything about) and you'll see titles upon titles of similar-ish content, retelling similar-ish stories. This is just what publishing is like.
I can't begin to describe how sick I am of books with titles How [X] Changed the World or How [X] Made the Modern World. Having studied economic history/the industrial revolution for real, I'm naturally interested in those topics... but not everything can have been the ONE MAJOR AMAZING thing that turned us from destitute farmers to flourishing digital.
What you're objecting to, then is just bitcoin mainstreaming itself into every aspect of human life. Of course people are going to look at it from a thousand different angles and try to make sense of it.
Second: Everyone Not the Same
There are exceptions of course, where authors manage to capture many subjects and blend them together in a coherent useful book, … these books aren’t perfect or “our bible”, but they at least are useful. Notably, Broken Money and The Bitcoin Standard come to mind.
Precisely. Here are some Bitcoin books that are clearly different, and clearly valuable in their own right:
- Bushido of Bitcoin
- The Genesis Book
- Broken Money (#859969)
- Bitcoin Age (#910275)
- Inventing Bitcoin
- Mastering Lightning
- The Blocksize War
- Resistance Money (#270434)
I think of this a little bit like music production (#796401), art, start-ups, academic papers etc (the 80/20 principle; the one-percent principle): we don't know, ex ante, which specific version of an idea will be the dominant, valuable one. So plenty of people experiment with slightly different versions of things... and only some of them, ideally the best ones, win out over time, crystallizing themselves as "the canon" to speak literature. In hindsight, it'll look like there was 99 versions of crap for every 1 good, valuable one.
You're right to be skeptical whenever you hear of a new bitcoin book ("Another one?!"), but should ask: what does this one bring to the table that the others haven't?
When the answer is "something new, something different" that's good enough reason to engage with it.
Those are my two book-related sats.