This book, Beyond Bitcoin, by Stephen Boykey Sidley and Simond Dingle, published first in February of this year and launched at the same time at GIBS, is almost certainly out-of-date.
As its title implies, in the beginning was Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology and invented in 2009 by someone or something called Satoshi Nakamoto. To this day, nobody really knows who Nakamoto is or was, but it’s almost irrelevant because Bitcoin is a monolith, secure – mostly – and immutable.
But then along came another crypto called Ethereum, which turned out to be much more useful because developers could build things on it and around it.
Sidley and Dingle’s book leads us into the jungle that has sprung up as a result and charts a way through the crypto undergrowth: “Liquidity pools and mining incentives and synthetic derivatives and AMMS and governance tokens are intrinsically opaque, an entirely new language from an alien planet.”
Beyond Bitcoin is definitely a useful first guidebook for anyone interested in business, finance, or just consumer economics.
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