This “best-of” edition comes as Byron wraps up a long weekend. Today’s newsletter was first run in October 2024, when bitcoin was trading at an all-time-high of about $66,000. Nearly two years later, it’s trading at about $75,000. This supports the below assertion that the price of bitcoin is the least interesting thing about it. 

Book review: Resistance Money

The current crypto bull market has felt distinctly joyless and I think that’s because it has lacked purpose.

Unlike previous cycles inspired by the hope and novelty of internet-native money, ICOs, DeFi or NFTs, the 2024 cycle was kickstarted by the distinctly uninspiring spot bitcoin ETF.

The simple purpose of an ETF is that it goes up, and if you listen to this cycle’s loudest evangelist, Michael Saylor, you’ll think that’s the purpose of bitcoin too — Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention, by their telling, is simply something that goes up.

It has gone up, which is nice. But the narrative around bitcoin — increasingly removed from its cypherpunk roots — has become a bit soulless in the process.

Fortunately, I’m here to report that I’ve found an antidote for that: Resistance Money — a book-length explainer on what bitcoin is and why it matters.

Across a brisk 322 pages, the price of bitcoin gets nary a mention.

Instead, the book’s mission is to make the reader think hard about whether bitcoin is a net positive for the world, irrespective of its fluctuating purchasing power.

The authors make a compelling case that it is.

I'm not usually enough of a bitcoin guy to want to read a whole book on it — how much can there be to say about digital gold? — but I’m glad I did and I’d have happily read more.

Without looking at the cover, you’d never know that Resistance Money was written by academics, let alone a committee of them.

Co-authored by three professors of philosophy, Resistance Money is, among other things, a highly readable reference book for responding to bitcoin’s many critics. The book methodically (but engagingly!) dismantles every critique of bitcoin — usually with the simple force of logic. 

On bitcoin being used to evade sanctions, for example, the authors argue that “if you wouldn’t accept payment from sanctioned entities on a bank’s private ledger for fear of reprisal, you also wouldn’t take this hot potato on a fully public ledger.”

They do the same for bitcoin’s carbon emissions (“environmentalists can embrace bitcoin without betraying their values”), bitcoin as the criminal money-of-choice (“bitcoin’s existence does not substantially increase things like money laundering”), bitcoin as ransomware currency (“effective countermeasures already exist for the ransomware that it enables”), and bitcoin as censorship-resistant money (“the world would be better off with perfectly uncensorable money”) — as well as roughly 20 other common critiques of bitcoin.

All of the authors’ rejoinders are offered thoughtfully and respectfully: Resistance Money is completely devoid of the counterproductive dismissiveness that’s so pervasive among bitcoin’s usual defenders.

The book also offers the best and most easily comprehensible explanation I’ve found on how bitcoin is created, recorded and sent around. 

I usually skim over technical crypto explainers and I didn’t make much more of an effort here. But the authors explain bitcoin’s inner workings so cleanly that — with only minimal re-reading of the most technical parts — I learned how bitcoin works almost in spite of myself. 

Resistance Money is just technical enough to make me feel like I (finally, for the first time) understand how bitcoin works. It’s also just not technical enough that I could easily follow along.

I did not know, for example, that miners win blocks by finding a low-enough number, rather than an exact one: "This aptly named hash function spits out a number, and if it’s ‘low enough,’ the miner wins.” And I now have an intuitive sense of how bitcoin’s unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) works: “UTXOs are like checks that pile up and never get cashed but do get bundled into larger checks when part of a larger transaction.”

I also enjoyed learning the fun fact that “all possible private keys [for bitcoin] already exist…there are close to 10^77 private keys — within striking distance of atoms in the visible universe.” 

This is useful stuff and well worth the $25 cost of admission.

But the even greater value in Resistance Money is the positive case the authors make for bitcoin — and the memorable way in which they choose to make it.

Behind the veil

My measure of a great book is how long I retain even a single idea or mental image from it. 

Resistance Money already qualifies because its image of reasoning about bitcoin from “behind the veil” is an unforgettable one. 

The authors make the positive case for bitcoin by asking you to forget who you are and imagine that, before your identity is revealed to you, you’re invited to choose whether bitcoin should exist.

Would you prefer to re-enter a world with or without bitcoin? 

Recalling that you might be revealed as a citizen of a country suffering chronic hyperinflation, a persecuted Russian dissident, or a woman in Afghanistan, the authors will likely convince you that, without knowing who you are, you would undoubtedly prefer to live in a world with bitcoin. 

(In my money-centric imagination, I imagined myself returning as someone who bought bitcoin at $1. But that’s not really what they meant.)

Yes, you also risk finding out you were someone caught in a bitcoin scam. Or that you’re the jailed purveyor of some such a scam, like SBF.

But the odds of those unfortunate outcomes are vanishingly small relative to the one-in-four odds of being born into a country with a less-than-reliable monetary regime.

“Behind the veil, you know eight billion lives from the inside out,” the authors explain. “You don’t know which is yours, but you do know that you might be one of the two billion people whose central banks have failed them. In that case, would you want access to an alternative? Might you want the option of using a rule-based monetary system without the risks imposed by trusted makers? We would. Perhaps you would too.”

The case for choosing a world with bitcoin is even starker considering the one-in-two odds of being born into a country with an authoritarian government.

“By eliminating intermediaries,” the authors say, “bitcoin empowers individuals to resist increasingly powerful institutions who would spy on, control, or block their money. Given the global prevalence of institutions who do all three, resistance money is choice-worthy behind the veil. If you didn’t know who you’d be, you’d want bitcoin around just in case you might need to resist those institutions.”

Even as someone who has won life’s lottery by being born into a prosperous country with limited government, I find it impossible to argue with that — because the authors also make a convincing case that we are all less removed from the risk of financial censorship than we probably think we are.

We should therefore welcome bitcoin’s existence: “Resistance money is a vital check against the rising threat of authoritarian rule, a condition under which billions already suffer today.”

If that sounds ideological to you, you will especially appreciate Resistance Money. It persuasively makes the case for why non-ideologues should care about bitcoin.

And not just because the price seems likely to go up.

— Byron Gilliam

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