New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 FINANCIAL TIMES AND MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR
A New York Times technology and business reporter charts the dramatic rise of Bitcoin and the fascinating personalities who are striving to create a new global money for the Internet age.
Digital Gold is New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper’s brilliant and engrossing history of Bitcoin, the landmark digital money and financial technology that has spawned a global social movement.
The notion of a new currency, maintained by the computers of users around the world, has been the butt of many jokes, but that has not stopped it from growing into a technology worth billions of dollars, supported by the hordes of followers who have come to view it as the most important new idea since the creation of the Internet. Believers from Beijing to Buenos Aires see the potential for a financial system free from banks and governments. More than just a tech industry fad, Bitcoin has threatened to decentralize some of society’s most basic institutions.
An unusual tale of group invention, Digital Gold charts the rise of the Bitcoin technology through the eyes of the movement’s colorful central characters, including an Argentinian millionaire, a Chinese entrepreneur, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and Bitcoin’s elusive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Already, Bitcoin has led to untold riches for some, and prison terms for others.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

Business & Money

Popper, Nathaniel

Biography & History

Harper Paperbacks

A leading legal scholar offers a compelling new theory to explain the meteoric rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their impact on art, business, entertainment, and society, and explains how they are revolutionizing our understanding of ownership. If you buy an NFT, do you own anything Critics say no. Then why are people spending so much money to own them--to the tune of $27 billion in 2021 And why are big businesses and venture capital firms investing hundreds of millions to develop NFTs for people's use in the metaverse, a purely imaginary world In Creators Take Control, Edward Lee offers a compelling new theory he calls "Tokenism" that answers these perplexing questions. Using vivid examples, Lee lucidly explains how NFTs operate--and how they fundamentally change our understanding of ownership. Tokenism is an artistic, cultural, and technological movement that creates value in a new kind of ownership of a new type of property--symbolized by a virtual token--through a process of technological abstraction and artificial scarcity effectuated by NFTs. Ownership becomes virtual. What Cubism did in radically changing the twentieth-century perspective of creating and viewing art through cubes, Tokenism does today in altering our perspective of owning art and other things through tokens. Both movements radically reimagine what's possible. Creators and businesses have seized upon this profound transformation. In a short time, they have developed a new market for digital art, important new rights for creators, innovative business models based on decentralized collaboration, and a new type of interactive ownership that enables identity, community, and patronage through NFTs. These innovations are just the start of revolutionary changes to society. Lee shows how NFTs create a new form of decentralized intellectual property, or De-IP. Comparable to the movement to decentralized finance (DeFi), De-IP empowers creators to take control of their artistic productions and livelihood. Lee's intellectual tour de force is filled with practical insights--and hope--for fostering creativity and a Virtual Renaissance for the ages.

Creators Take Control: How NFTs Revolutionize Art, Business, and Entertainment

Lee, Edward

Economics

Harper Business

Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies, Their Communities, Markets, and Blockchains

Çalişkan, Koray

Columbia University Press

The cryptocurrency world has transformed in a few short years from a niche subculture to a parallel economic universe, reaching a market capitalization of more than $2.5 trillion in 2021 before plummeting in 2022. For their advocates, cryptocurrencies represent a revolution of world-historical significance. To critics, crypto is more of a speculative tool than a true currency. How do tens of thousands of financial actors make these new monies? What forces give cryptocurrencies their value-or take it away? And what does crypto's spectacular ascent reveal about the nature of money? In this groundbreaking ethnographic analysis of crypto economies and their global markets and communities, Koray Caliskan offers an inside view of how cryptocurrencies are made and traded. He argues that cryptocurrency should be understood as "data money," a historically novel money type, created as the right to send data privately over an accounting infrastructure called blockchain. Drawing on two years of fieldwork among global cryptocurrency communities and in crypto markets, Caliskan makes visible the production principles of cryptocurrencies and explores how crypto exchanges work from within. He explains why and how we have been misunderstanding, underregulating, and improperly taxing crypto exchanges and actors. He also proposes a radically new way to make sense of new finance and its actors. An invaluable book for all readers seeking to understand cryptocurrency, Data Money sheds new light on a profound transformation of finance and its possible future trajectories.

Why are the world's most powerful companies and governments excited about a technology beloved by criminals and radicals? And why do people invest their money--or their trust--in mysterious cryptocurrencies seemingly based on nothing? In an era when trust in institutions of all kinds is collapsing, the blockchain offers a new hope: Shared ledgers of information that no one controls but everyone can believe. Since its emergence a decade ago with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the blockchain has spawned hundreds of companies, billions of dollars of investment, and adoption by companies ranging from the New York Stock Exchange to Walmart. Yet it remains wildly misunderstood. Wharton professor Kevin Werbach offers the first in-depth, balanced analysis of the blockchain's true potential, as well as its limitations and dangers. He maps the often-confusing landscape, and shows how a technology resting on foundations of mutual mistrust can become trustworthy. Surprisingly for a technology widely associated with illegality, fraud, and distrust of governments, the path to trusted blockchains runs through governance, regulation, and law.

The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust (Information Policy)

Werbach, Kevin

The MIT Press

How companies can gain strategic advantage by developing blockchain capabilities. Blockchain is far more than cryptocurrency. Regarded for a decade as complex and with limited application, blockchain has now matured to be on the verge of fully realizing its disruptive potential. In Enterprise Strategy for Blockchain, business strategy expert Ravi Sarathy shows how companies can gain competitive advantage by developing and deploying blockchain capabilities. Sarathy explains what makes blockchain unique, including its capacities to eliminate intermediaries, guard against hackers, decentralize, and protect privacy. Presenting examples drawn from such sectors as finance, supply chains, computer services, consumer products, and entertainment, he describes how executives can strategically assess blockchain's applicability to their business. After outlining blockchain's technological features-and its technological obstacles-Sarathy describes disruptive technologies already happening in the financial services market with the emergence of decentralized finance, or DeFi, arguing that a wave of innovation might be positioning DeFi as blockchain's "killer app." He also explores, among many other uses, a blockchain application that addresses chronic supply chain problems, pilot blockchain programs aimed at facilitating cross-border payments, and the use of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that allow digital art to be collected and traded. And he outlines a path for organizations that includes establishing a business case for applying blockchain, evaluating enterprise cost-benefits, and preparing the organization to develop the requisite knowledge and people skills while overcoming resistance to change. Business leaders should invest, explore and experiment with blockchain now, positioning their organizations to be first in their fields, ahead of both rising startups and late-to-the game incumbent peers.

Enterprise Strategy for Blockchain: Lessons in Disruption from Fintech, Supply Chains, and Consumer Industries (Management on the Cutting Edge)

Sarathy, Ravi

Management & Leadership

Blockchain Governance (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

De Filippi, Primavera

Reijers, Wessel

Mannan, Morshed

175 countries, four billion dollars, one scam: the thrilling rise and fall of the biggest cryptocurrency con in history and the woman behind it all In 2016, on stage at Wembley Arena in front of thousands of adoring fans, Dr. Ruja Ignatova promised her followers a financial revolution. The future, she said, belonged to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And the Oxford-educated, self-styled cryptoqueen vowed that she had invented the Bitcoin Killer. OneCoin would not only earn its investors untold fortunes; it would change the world. &nbsp; By March 2017, more than $4 billion had been invested in OneCoin in countries all around the world. But by October 2017, Ruja Ignatova had disappeared, and it slowly became clear that her revolutionary cryptocurrency was not all it seemed. Fortune was left asking, "Is OneCoin the biggest financial fraud in history?" In&nbsp;The Missing Cryptoqueen, acclaimed tech journalist Jamie Bartlett tells the story he began in his smash hit BBC podcast, entering the murky worlds of little-regulated cryptocurrencies and multilevel marketing schemes. Through a globe-crossing investigation into the criminal underworlds, corrupt governments, and the super-rich, he reveals a very modern tale of intrigue, techno-hype and herd madness that allowed OneCoin to become a million-person pyramid scheme - where, at the top, investors were making millions and, at the bottom, people were putting their livelihoods at risk. It's the inside story of the smartest and biggest scam of the 21st Century - and the genius behind it, who is still on the run.

The Missing Cryptoqueen: The Billion Dollar Cryptocurrency Con and the Woman Who Got Away with It

Biographies & Memoirs

Bartlett, Jamie

True Crime

Grand Central Publishing

The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age

A Top 10 Book of Essays &amp; Literary Criticism for Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly | Books We Can’t Wait to Read in the Rest of 2017, Chicago Reader
The slippery online ecosystem is the perfect breeding ground for identities: true, false, and in between. The Internet shorthand IRL―“in real life”―now seems naïve. We no longer question the reality of online experiences but the reality of selfhood in the digital age.
In The Secret Life: Three True Stories, the essayist and novelist Andrew O’Hagan issues three bulletins from the porous border between cyberspace and IRL. “Ghosting” introduces us to the beguiling and divisive Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whose autobiography the author agrees to ghostwrite with unforeseen―and unforgettable―consequences. “The Invention of Ronnie Pinn” finds the author using the actual identity of a deceased young man to construct an entirely new one in cyberspace, leading him on a journey deep into the Web’s darkest realms. And “The Satoshi Affair” chronicles the strange case of Craig Wright, the Australian Web developer who may or may not be the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto―and who may or may not be willing, or even able, to reveal the truth.
O’Hagan’s searching pieces take us to the weirder fringes of life in a digital world while also casting light on our shared predicaments. What does it mean when your very sense of self becomes, to borrow a term from the tech world, “disrupted”? Perhaps it takes a novelist, an inventor of selves, armed with the tools of a trenchant reporter, to find an answer.

Computers & Technology

O'HAGAN, ANDREW

Computer Science

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

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