Down the Rabbit Hole
I almost wish I hadn't gone down that rabbit-hole, and yet, and yet - it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life.
Through the Looking Glass
After writing 21 Lessons, I wrote some articles and essays to explore a few of Bitcoin’s aspects further. These articles are marked by an 🔍.
I am currently working on my second book, 21 Ways.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Find all ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ links for each lesson below. A curated list of Bitcoin resources is available at bitcoin-resources.com.
Lesson 1: Immutability and change
- There is no Bitcoin 2.0 by Pete Dushenski
- DAOs, Democracy and Governance by Ralph C. Merkle
- Inside the World of the Bitcoin Carnivores - Why a small community of Bitcoin users is eating meat exclusively by Jordan Pearson
- Unpacking Bitcoin’s Social Contract by Hasu
- Bitcoin is a Decentralized Organism by Brandon Quittem
- Bitcoin is a Social Creature by Brandon Quittem
- Bitcoin - Two Parts Math, One Part Biology by Hugo Nguyen
- It’s the settlement assurances, stupid by Nic Carter
- 🔍 The Bitcoin Journey
- Technical Discussion on Bitcoin’s Transactions and Scripts by Satoshi Nakamoto, Gavin Andresen, and others
- Marty’s Bent - A daily newsletter highlighting signal in Bitcoin by Marty Bent
- 🎧 Tales From the Crypt by Marty Bent
- 🎧 John Vallis & Richard James & Gigi Der & Robert Breedlove on Bitcoin as The Future of Money
JBP#440 hosted by Jordan B. Peterson - 📚 Antifragile - Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Lesson 2: The scarcity of scarcity
- Modeling Bitcoin’s Value with Scarcity by PlanB
- Bitcoin Can’t Be Copied by Parker Lewis
- Presentation on The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous
- 🎧 Misir Mahmudov on the Scarcity of Time and Bitcoin
TFTC#60 hosted by Marty Bent - 🎧 BTCDCA on Dollar Cost Averaging Bitcoin
BEC#20 hosted by Collin - 🎧 Misir Mahmudov on Bitcoin as Stored Time
OTC#126 hosted by Pomp - 🎧 Hass McCook on the importance of Auto-DCA
SLP#288 hosted by Stephan Livera - 📚 Abundance - The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis
- 📚 The Bitcoin Standard - The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous
Lesson 3: Replication and locality
- Where Am I? by Daniel Dennett
- 🔍 The Magic Dust of Cryptography - How digital information is changing our society
- 🎧 Peter Van Valkenburg on Preserving the Freedom to Innovate with Public Blockchains
WBD#49 hosted by Peter McCormack
Lesson 4: The problem of identity
- What Is It Like to be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel
- Bitcoin’s Existential Crisis by Nic Carter
- Ship of Theseus by Wikipedia Authors
- Trolley Problem by Wikipedia Authors
- 🎧 Giacomo Zucco on Bitcoin's Identity and Copycats
SLP#75 hosted by Stephan Livera - 📚 The Blocksize War - The Battle for Control over Bitcoin’s Protocol Rules by Jonathan Bier
Lesson 5: An immaculate conception
- Catallaxy - the origins of Bitcoin, innovation and spontaneous order by Francis Pouliot
- Why Bitcoin is Different by Jimmy Song
- Only The Strong Survive by Allen Farrington and Big Al
- Against Cryptocurrency - The Ethical Argument for Bitcoin Maximalism by Pete Rizzo
- Gold - The Extraordinary Metal by the Austrian Mint
- 🎧 Robert Breedlove on Bitcoin and the Number Zero
TFTC#162 hosted by Marty Bent - 🎧 Saifedean Ammous on Bitcoin's Immaculate Conception and the Fiat Standard
JBP#458 hosted by Jordan B. Peterson - 📚 The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Lesson 6: The power of free speech
- Why America Can’t Regulate Bitcoin by Beautyon
- Why Bitcoin Matters for Freedom by Alex Gladstein
- 🔍 The Rise of the Sovereign Individual - How power is re-aligning itself in an internet-native world
- A most peaceful revolution by Nic Carter
- 🔍 How to Kill Bitcoin
- Bitcoin Cannot Be Banned by Parker Lewis
- 🔍 Bitcoin's Habitats - How Bitcoin is surviving and thriving between worlds
- Can Governments Stop Bitcoin? by Alex Gladstein
- 🔍 Implications of Outlawing Bitcoin
- 🔍 Inalienable Property Rights - The Law, Language, Money, and Morality of Bitcoin
- Crypto Wars by Wikipedia Contributors
- Illegal Numbers by Wikipedia Contributors
- Illegal Primes by Wikipedia Contributors
- First Amendment to the United States Constitution by Wikipedia Contributors
- Freedom of Speech in Software by Phil Salin
- 🎧 Jameson Lopp on Freedom-Enabling Technologies like Bitcoin
TFTC#29 hosted by Marty Bent - 🎧 Alex Gladstein on Bitcoin’s Role in the Fight for Human Rights
TFTC#76 hosted by Marty Bent
Lesson 7: The limits of knowledge
- 🔍 Bitcoin's Eternal Struggle - How Bitcoin Thrives on the Edge between Order and Chaos
- Bitcoin Information & Resources by Jameson Lopp
- Bitcoin Literature by Satoshi Nakamoto Institute
- Educational Resources by Bitcoin Only
- Bitcoin Intro by 6102bitcoin
- 🎧 Matt Corallo on how Everyone is Ignorant when it comes to Bitcoin
TFTC#7 hosted by Marty Bent - 🎧 Ben Prentice on the Bitcoin Spectrum
BEC#14 hosted by Collin
Lesson 8: Financial ignorance
- Why the Rich are Getting Richer by Robert Kiyosaki
- 🎧 Stephan Livera - Intro to Bitcoin Austrian thought
SLP#71 hosted by Stephan Livera - 📚 Economic Depressions - Their Cause and Cure by Murray N. Rothbard
- 📚 Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
Lesson 9: Inflation
- 🔍 Bitcoin Boots on the Ground - Venezuela
- Economic Crisis in Venezuela by Wikipedia Contributors
- Hyperinflation by Wikipedia Contributors
- List of Currencies by Wikipedia Contributors
- List of Historical Currencies by Wikipedia Contributors
- List of Dead Fiat Currencies by Trader to Trader
- 🎧 Ben Prentice & Heavily Armed Clown on WTF Happened in 1971?
TFTC#157 hosted by Marty Bent - 🎧 Saifedean Ammous & George Gammon on Inflation, Deflation, and The Bitcoin Standard
SSL#23 hosted by Brady Swenson - 📚 1980S Unemployment And The Unions - Essays on the Impotent Price Structure of Britain and Monopoly in the Labour Market by Friedrich von Hayek
- 📚 Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
- 📚 Fiat Money Inflation In France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended by Andrew Dickson White
- 📚 Good Money, Part 2 - The Standard by Friedrich von Hayek
- 📚 Hard-Boiled Egg Index - Surviving Zimbabwe’s Hyperinflation by Kudzai Joseph Gumunyu
- 📚 When Money Dies - The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar, Germany by Adam Fergusson
Lesson 10: Value
- Bitcoin Has No Intrinsic Value — and That’s Great by Conner Brown
- Bitcoin Is Not Too Volatile by Parker Lewis
- Bitcoin Is Not Backed By Nothing by Parker Lewis
- Euthydemus by Plato
- Paradox of Value by Wikipedia Contributors
- Subjective Theory of Value by Wikipedia Contributors
- Theory of Value by Wikipedia Contributors
- 📚 Skin In The Game - Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Lesson 11: Money
- Shelling Out - The Origins of Money by Nick Szabo
- Money, blockchains, and social scalability by Nick Szabo
- The Bullish Case for Bitcoin by Vijay Boyapati
- Gradually, Then Suddenly by Parker Lewis
- Masters and Slaves of Money by Robert Breedlove
- 🎧 Tuur Demeester - Bitcoin 101
TIP#244 hosted by Preston Pysh and Stig Brodersen - 🎧 Conner Brown on the intersubjective nature of Bitcoin
TFTC#87 hosted by Marty Bent - 🎧 Parker Lewis - What is Money?
WBD#183 hosted by Peter McCormack - 📚 Argentarius - Letters of a Bankdirektor to his Son by Alfred Lansburgh
- 📚 End The Fed by Ron Paul
- 📚 What Has Government Done To Our Money by Murray Rothbard
Lesson 12: The history and downfall of money
- Enders Game by Parker Lewis
- Bitcoin Fixes This by Parker Lewis
- Bitcoin Obsoletes All Other Money by Parker Lewis
- Bitcoin Is a Rally Cry by Parker Lewis
- Bimetallism by Wikipedia Contributors
- Methods of Coin Debasement by Wikipedia Contributors
- Thaler by Wikipedia Contributors
- U.S. Silver Certificate by Wikipedia Contributors
- 📚 How Is Fiat Money Possible by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
- 📚 On The Origins Of Money by Carl Menger
Lesson 13: Fractional Reserve Insanity
- Austrian School by Wikipedia Contributors
- Keynesian Economics by Wikipedia Contributors
- Money Multiplier by Wikipedia Contributors
- Why the whole banking system is a scam by Godfrey Bloom
- 🎧 Jörg Guido Hülsmann on Fiat Money and Fractional Reserve Banking
SLP#51 hosted by Stephan Livera - 📚 The Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin
Lesson 14: Sound money
- Bitcoin’s distribution was fair by Dan Held
- Bitcoin is Common Sense by Parker Lewis
- Bitcoin’s Controlled Supply by Bitcoin Wiki Contributors
- Mineral Commodity Summaries 2019 by the United States Geological Survey
- Money Supply by Wikipedia Contributors
- Speed of Light by Wikipedia Contributors
- 🎧 Saifedean Ammous on Bitcoin as Sound Money
Noded#3 hosted by Michael Goldstein and Pierre Rochard - 🎧 Murad Mahmudov on Bitcoin as the World Reserve Currency
TFTC#34 hosted by Marty Bent - 📚 Money, Sound And Unsound by Joseph Salerno
- 📚 The Ethics Of Money Production by Jörg Guido Hülsmann
Lesson 15: Strength in numbers
- Block hashing algorithm by Bitcoin Wiki Contributors
- Discrete Logarithm by Wikipedia Contributors
- Dyson Sphere by Wikipedia Contributors
- How secure is 256 bit security? by 3Blue1Brown
- Landauer’s Principle by Wikipedia Contributors
- Last Glacial Maximum by Wikipedia Contributors
- P versus NP by Wikipedia Contributors
- SHA-2 by Wikipedia Contributors
- 📚 Fooled By Randomness - The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Lesson 16: Reflections on “Don’t Trust, Verify”
- Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson
- Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes by Nick Szabo
- The Bitcoin Whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto
- 51% Attack by Bitcoin Developer Guide Contributors
- Bootstrapping by Guix Manual Contributors
- Dual EC DRBG by Wikipedia Contributors
- ECC Backdoors by Wikipedia Contributors
- Secp256k1 by Bitcoin Wiki Contributors
Lesson 17: Telling time takes work
- Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work by Paul Sztorc
- Bitcoin Doesn’t Waste Electricity by Beautyon
- Blockchain Proof-of-Work Is a Decentralized Clock by Gregory Trubetskoy
- The Anatomy of Proof-of-Work by Hugo Nguyen
- 🔍 Bitcoin's Energy Consumption - A shift in perspective
- Work is Timeless, Stake is Not by Hugo Nguyen
- Bitcoin Does Not Waste Energy by Parker Lewis
- Bitcoin Astronomy by Dhruv Bansal
- The Last Word on Bitcoin’s Energy Consumption by Nic Carter
- 🔍 Bitcoin Is Time
- Uncovering The Hidden Costs Of The Petrodollar by Alex Gladstein
- Controlled Supply by Bitcoin Wiki Contributors
- Mining by Bitcoin Wiki Contributors
- 🎧 Trace Mayer on Bitcoin Valuation, Trust, and Energy Consumption
TIP#252 hosted by Breston Pysh and Stig Brodersen - 🎧 Robert Breedlove on Understanding Bitcoin from First Principles
CB#52 hosted by Brady Swenson
Lesson 18: Move slowly and don’t break things
- Bitcoin Is Not Too Slow by Parker Lewis
- Parable of the Wise and the Foolish Builders by Wikipedia Contributors
- Segregated Witness (SegWit) by Bitcoin Wiki Contributors
- Pay to Script Hash (P2SH) by Bitcoin Wiki Contributors
- Taproot proposal by Gregory Maxwell
- Schnorr signatures BIP by Pieter Wuille
Lesson 19: Privacy is not dead
- Digital Cash & Privacy by Hal Finney
- The Case for Privacy by David D. Friedman
- Protect Your Privacy by Bitcoin.org
- How Lightning Layers Privacy on Top of Bitcoin by Aaron van Wirdum
- Dandelions, and a Bright Future for Bitcoin Privacy by Guy Swann
- The Case for Electronic Cash by Jerry Brito
- We Must Protect our Ability to Transact Privately Online by Jerry Brito
- Bitcoin Wiki’s Privacy Aritcle by Chris Belcher
- How Private is Bitcoin? by Eric Wall
- Bitcoin and Privacy by Edward Snowden
- 🔍 True Names Not Required
- Bitcoin And The Hidden Costs Of Hyper-Adoption by L0la L33tz
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations
- A lower bound on the length of the shortest superpattern by Anonymous 4chan Poster, Robin Houston, Jay Pantone, and Vince Vatter
- 🎧 Jameson Lopp on Privacy, Security, and Personal Sovereignty
C&G#35 hosted by CryptoDantes and Stigofthepump - 🎧 6102bitcoin on Bitcoin Privacy, Education, KYC, and Pseudonymity
SLP#178 hosted by Stephan Livera - 📚 American Kingpin - The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton
Lesson 20: Cypherpunks write code
- The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto by Timothy C. May
- A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto by Eric Hughes
- The Cyphernomicon by Timothy C. May
- 🔍 Bitcoin Is an Idea
- Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper announcement by Satoshi Nakamoto
- Bitcoin version 0.1.0 announcement by Satoshi Nakamoto
- Cypherpunks Write Code by ReasonTV
- 📚 Cypherpunks - Freedom and the Future of the Internet by Jacob Appelbaum Julian Assange Andy Zimmermann
- 📚 The Book Of Satoshi - The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto by Phil Champagne
Lesson 21: Metaphors for Bitcoin’s future
- The Electricity Metaphor for the Web’s Future by Jeff Bezos
- How the internet has woven itself into American life by Susannah Fox and Lee Rainie
- Hyperbitcoinization by Daniel Krawisz
- Speculative Attack by Pierre Rochard
- The 7 Network Effects of Bitcoin by Trace Mayer
- The Rising Speed of Technological Adoption by Jeff Desjardins
- Hyperbitcoinization - Winner Takes All by ObiWan Kenobit
- 🔍 The World is Waking Up to Bitcoin
- Bitcoin, Not Blockchain by Parker Lewis
- 🔍 Dear Legacy People
- 🔍 Dear Bitcoiners - An optimistic letter to friends and foes around the globe
- 🔍 Dear Family, Dear Friends
- You Are Not Prepared by Knut Svanholm
- 🔍 On Bitcoin's UX
- Genesis Block by Bitcoin Wiki Contributors
- Lindy Effect by Wikipedia Contributors
- Bitcoin and Technology Adoption S-Curves by Bitcoin Croesus
- 🎧 Murad Mahmudov on The Ultimate Bitcoin Argument
OTC#25 hosted by Pomp - 🎧 Bitcoin Tina on Why he is Bullish on Bitcoin
TFTC#55 hosted by Marty Bent - 🎧 Pierre Rochard on Hyperbitcoinization and Bitcoin Maximalism
HF#75 hosted by Demetri Kofinas - 🎧 Jack Mallers on how Bitcoin Disrupts Payment Clearing Houses
TIP#BTC007 hosted by Preston Pysh - 🎧 Jack Mallers on El Salvador's Bitcoin Standard
WBD#362 hosted by Peter McCormack