A lot of the ideas that grew enough to change our civilization forever came from the written word. This way, brilliant and creative minds from all eras have left us their knowledge to improve the future, and it couldn’t be any other way in the crypto industry —whose roots go back long before the beginning of Bitcoin.
For cypherpunks and crypto enthusiasts diving into the realm of digital privacy, security, digital rights, and decentralized technologies, a curated selection of readings could serve as an invaluable compass. With this in mind, let’s discover some must-read books to navigate the ideological foundations of this open field.
The Machinery of Freedom
David D. Friedman is an American economist, physicist, and legal scholar who wasn’t on the cypherpunk mailing list in the 90s, but he’s considered a cypherpunk anyway. Not to mention that his ideas are also an inspiration for the crypto-anarchism manifesto published in 1988 by
“The basic history of these ideas is that I stole them from a bunch of people called ‘Cypherpunks,’ of whom the leading light is Tim May, who stole some of them from me… and then I stole the ideas back from him.”
Both May and Friedman were talking specifically about the book “
Drawing from economic principles and historical examples, Friedman explores how decentralized mechanisms can foster order, justice, and prosperity more effectively than centralized authority. He challenges conventional notions of governance, offering a thought-provoking vision of a stateless society grounded in individual freedom and market forces. Does it sound like a society with cryptocurrencies? Well, yes.
The Denationalisation of Money
In case you didn’t know this, for now, traditional money (USD, EUR, CNY, etc.) is fully issued and controlled by national or regional central banks. At the same time, those central banks are regulated and governed by a certain state (US for USD, CNY for China, etc.). In other words, money is in the hands of governments only, which don’t always make the best decisions with it.
The Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek advocated against this system in his book “
Hayek argued that state monopolies on money production could lead to economic instability and inflation, and proposed a system where private entities would issue their own currencies backed by commodities or trusted institutions. Through this decentralized approach, Hayek envisioned a more stable monetary system that could adapt to market forces and foster innovation, ultimately promoting economic freedom and prosperity.
Sadly, Hayek didn’t get to know cryptocurrencies before he passed in 1992. But
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Now that we’ve seen economists, it’s time for a programmer to shine. This book isn’t exactly about decentralized money, but about decentralized development. And that’s another important part of the crypto world, where most projects are open source and collaborative.
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“In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you've winkled them all out (...) In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena—or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quickly when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM4I4dBw4DQ&embedable=true
He also coined Linus’s law here: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." This open approach has served thousands of developers and organizations in crypto, starting from Satoshi Nakamoto himself. It’d be weird to see a non-open cryptocurrency code, not maintained by its own community of programmers. According to the Electric Capital Developer Report,
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet
Julian Assange, as you likely know, is the creator of the controversial document-leaking platform WikiLeaks, but he’s also a remarkable cypherpunk himself. He fully embraced this ideology in his book “
We can say that this book is also available on video since it’s mostly a transcript from the series “World Tomorrow” (The Julian Assange Show), aired in 2012 by the television network Russia Today (RT). In the show, Assange interviewed those activists across twelve episodes of around 26 minutes each.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M1fHfKenTM&embedable=true
The Network State
Old forms of money, governance, and surveillance should be left behind for crypto-anarchists, but the Indian-American entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan proposed to go a step further by also replacing the traditional concept of nation. In his book, “The Network State: How to Start a New Country,” published in 2022, he described how to start a whole new stateless nation from scratch — with its own money and systems, and formed by like-minded people distributed all around the world.
This new type of country would start online and then would evolve into “physical nodes” funded and governed by its members.
“A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.”
Anyone could choose to join a certain network state and abide by its rules and benefits, written and shared via smart contract. For Srinivasan, this system could be better than the alternative: be governed by the left or right global powers, which will always ensure the control and surveillance of the population while competing against each other. Is this really possible for the future? We still can’t know but, at the very least, the tools to start it are already there.
Bonus: 1984 by Orwell
Unlike the others on this list, this is actually a fiction book, but one that still could be a grim portrait of our future if we allow mass surveillance and total control by governments. Published in 1949 by George Orwell, this dystopian novel is set in a grim society where every action is monitored and independent thought is punishable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9JIKngJnCU&embedable=true
That’s why we included it in the
By leveraging distributed ledger technology and cryptographic tools,
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