The Age of Cryptocurrency

This weekend I finished reading Vigna & Casey's Bitcoin book, The Age of Cryptocurrency, which really shows how mainstream the topic has become in the past few years. I read Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper a couple years ago and was instantly hooked on the brilliance of the idea of a ledger open for anyone to read but protected from counterfeiting by hashing much like git does for code repositories. Of course, that doesn't mean that I've put my month where my mouth is...except to buy this book.

Vigna & Casey, both journalists used to covering Wall Street, also give us an outsider's prespective. There remain a number of unanswered questions in their book. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Why did the man/woman/group that created bitcoin release it and then disappear? Where did the hundreds of thousands of Mt. Gox bitcoins vanish to when that firm collapsed? etc.

What they do provide, however, is a sweeping review of the ecosystem which has grown up around the idea of bitcoin. They discuss payment processing companies implementing bitcoin. They discuss bitcoin knockoffs. They talk about fortunes made and lost trading in bitcoin. They interview some of the key players on the open source consortium continuing development of bitcoin. They review the regulatory and legal structure which is popping up in various jurisdictions. And they speculate about future developments bitcoin could provide for.

Personally, my gut still tells me bitcoin is the MySpace of the industry. Sure, they are the first mover, but bitcoin hasn't created an easy for anybody to use and understand platform. I still think a bitcoin 2.0 will come along and cannibalize and expand the market much like Facebook did to MySpace or Google did to the search engine market before that. Surely there are enough computer science grad students working on just that!