The Book of Satoshi: The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto

Given Satoshi’s mystery identity there is some fascination, I suppose, in going through his actual conversations with fellow software programmers during the creation and early days of bitcoin. But it really isn’t much more than that. Phil Champagne would have done better if he had just summarised the conclusions and drawings from all the threads and compiled them into a clean, crisp and easier to understand book. Instead what we have here is a somewhat disorganised chain of multiple discussion threads, containing enormous repetition, redundancy of issues and the occasional dose of technical language that the layperson cannot understand. There are still plenty of useful learnings and fascinating discoveries about bitcoin to be made by reading this book, but one can’t help feeling that a much better effort was possible. There is no question that for pure bitcoin or blockchain knowledge there are better books available. But for whatever it’s worth, a few things you DO learn by going through the actual threads themselves is that (a) software programmers are terrible economists (the discussions around fiat currencies and monetary policy proves that repeatedly) and that is one of the reasons crypto currencies are failing as ‘currencies’ and therefore trying to morph into ‘assets’, (b) Satoshi never intended for bitcoin to become what it has today i.e. a quasi/pseudo currency whose value stems more from its speculative trading potential and the ability to evade law enforcement, rather than from any legitimate or intrinsic benefits it offers (he originally set out to solve mainly the ‘trusted party’ problem and the low transaction size constraint), and (c) Satoshi’s real gift to the world is ‘blockchain’, not bitcoin or cryptos. It is the blockchain technology that is revolutionising the world and will continue to do so (whereas bitcoin/crypto currencies have a dubious/different future).

What’s good - this has writings directly from Satoshi What could be omitted - some of the design choices that were made are discussed in detail and might not be of interest to folks in 2021 What could be added - what happened to bitcoin post 2014