Book Review of ‘Money Code Space: Hidden Power in Bitcoin, Blockchain and Decentralisation’

This will be a quick review.

This is a book published in 2020, written by Jack Parkin and published by the Oxford University Press.

Cryptocurrencies is becoming a more undeniable part of modern life. Banks used to mock it, investors used to condemn it. Now banks are using it and investors are racing to get into it.

Knowledge on cryptocurrencies is knowledge that will make you more future-ready.

For this, I turned a little to the past, to the mother of all cryptocurrencies — bitcoin. This is what attracted me to buy this book.

Money Code Space looks at Bitcoin’s origins and unravels not only its technical underpinnings but also the politics that surround it. Cryptocurrencies — much like the early internet — has been hailed as a technology that gives power back to the people (away from central institutions such as the government and central banks). How true is this? Does bitcoin live up to the ‘decentralised’ promise that cyrptocurrencies are said to deliver on?

This is what Parkin writes on.

He performs feats of social anthropology by embedding himself in communities centred around crypto, in order to write on it. Parkin points out how…