Sovereign Person ~ James Dale Davidson and William Rice Morgue
Sovereign Personality is one of those books that changes the way you see the world forever. It was published in 1997, but the degree to which it predicts the impact of blockchain technology will give you a shiver. We are entering the fourth stage of human society, moving from the industrial to the information age. You need to read this book to understand the scale and scale of how things will change.
As it becomes easier to live comfortably and make a profit anywhere, we already know that those who are truly thriving in the new information age will be workers who are not tied to one job or career and are independent of location. Attracting a choice of where to live on cost savings is already more attractive, but it goes beyond digital roaming and freelance concerts; the foundations of democracy, power and money are shifting.
The authors predicted Black Tuesday and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and here they predicted that the rise in power of individuals would coincide with decentralized technology that takes away government power. The death toll in nation-states, as they predicted with extreme foresight, will be private digital cash. If this happens, the dynamics of governments as stationary thugs who rob hard-working taxable citizens will change. If you become someone who can solve problems for people anywhere in the world, then you are about to enter a new cognitive elite. Don’t miss this one.
Quote of choice: “If technology is mobile and transactions take place in cyberspace, as will increasingly be the case, governments will no longer be able to charge for their services more than they cost from the people who pay for them.”
Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind ~ Yuval Noah Harari
Whenever I want to impress someone on how good this book is, I ask, “Do you want to know the fundamental difference between humans and monkeys? A monkey can jump up and down a rock, wave a stick and shout to his friends that he saw a threat, coming on their way. ”Danger! Danger! A lion! “A monkey can also lie. She can jump up and down a rock, wave a stick and shout about a lion when in fact there is no lion. He’s just fooling around. But a monkey can’t jump down and down, waving a stick and shouting,” Danger! Danger “Dragon!”
Why is that? Because dragons are not real. As Harari explains, it is the human imagination, our ability to believe and talk about things we have never seen or touched, that has pushed the species to collaborate in large numbers with strangers. There are no gods, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, no religion, no justice in the universe beyond people’s common imagination. This is what we make them like.
All of this is a pretty wonderful preamble to where we are today. After the cognitive and agricultural revolution Harari takes you to the Scientific Revolution, which began just 500 years ago and which can start something completely different for humanity. The money, however, will remain. Read this book to understand that money is the greatest story ever told, and that trust is the raw material from which all kinds of money are made.
Quote of choice: “Sapiens, by contrast, lives in a three-layered reality. In addition to trees, rivers, fears and desires, the world of the intelligent also contains stories about money, gods, nations and corporations.”
Online Money ~ Andreas M. Antonapoulos
While the two books mentioned above help us understand the historical context in which bitcoin first appeared, this book enthusiastically tells the story of “why”. Andreas Antonapoulos is perhaps the most respected voice in the crypto space. He has been traveling the world as a bitcoin evangelist since 2010, and this book is a summary of conversations he had on the chain between 2013 and 2016, all prepared for publication.
His first book, Mastering Bitcoin, is a technically deep immersion in technology aimed more specifically at software developers, engineers and architects. But this book uses some metaphors of choice to explain why you can’t ban bitcoin or disable it, how the scaling debate doesn’t really matter and why bitcoin needs the help of designers to secure mass acceptance.
“When you drive your brand new car in the city for the first time,” he writes, “you drive on horses on horses with infrastructure designed and used for horses. There are no light signals. There are no traffic rules. roads. And what happened? The cars got stuck because they had no balance and four feet. ” But rewinding a hundred years ahead, and machines that were once ridiculed, are the norm. If you want to swim into the philosophical, social and historical implications of Bitcoin, this is your starting point.
Quote of choice: “Bitcoin is not just money for the Internet. Yes, it is perfect money for the Internet. It is instant, secure, free. Yes, it is money for the Internet, but it is much more. Bitcoin is the Internet of money. Currency is “Only the first application. If you understand this, you can look beyond price, you can look beyond volatility, you can look beyond fashion. At its core, Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology that will change the world forever. Join.”