The technological/cultural revolutions behind bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies, and the online public ledger blockchain that bitcoin operates on, are steadily gaining more public awareness, both positive and negative.
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In April, I attended a highly interesting bitcoin/blockchain panel discussion featuring Wall Street Journal reporters Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey, at the D.C. headquarters of Consumers’ Research, which has lately taken a keen interest and involvement in these subjects. Kyle Burgess, the organization’s director of operations, recently participated in the Block Chain Summit, hosted by Richard Branson on Necker Island. You can read her takeaways here.
The occasion for the April panel was the release earlier in the year of Vigna and Casey’s The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order. Their book is an excellent introduction to bitcoin and the blockchain: its history (which dates back less than seven years), operations, major players and its (by no means assured) future. Vigna and Casey cover these topics regularly in their BitBeat column in The Wall Street Journal.
As noted in Tim Sullivan’s June 2015 Harvard Business Review article Transparency, Trust, and Bitcoin; there are other recent books worth reading, along with Vigna/Casey. The most recent is Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, by New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper. His book concentrates on the colorful personalities of the people behind the cryptocurrency revolution.
The other book Sullivan covers is Coined: The Rich Life Of Money And How Its History Has Shaped Us, by Kabir Sehgal; whose varied career includes stints as a vice president in emerging market equities at J. P. Morgan; and a Grammy-winning jazz producer and bassist. Sehgal’s book is more wide-ranging, about the entire topic of money, including its history. (Vigna and Casey’s book is very strong on this area as well.)
