The Cryptocurrency Revolution

Author: Rhian Lewis
Publisher: Kogan Page Publishers
ISBN: 1789665698
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
The world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains was initially viewed as a niche space of little interest to mainstream business and finance sectors. With major banks now licensed to provide cryptocurrency custody solutions, and everyone from Facebook to governments using the underlying technology to create their own digital currencies, this has undoubtedly changed. The Cryptocurrency Revolution explains the most important takeaways from the continued growth of digital currencies and blockchain technology and explores the transformative possibilities of borderless payments, decentralized finance ('DeFi') and machine-to-machine transactions. Written in jargon-free and accessible language, this book examines the key value proposition of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and how decentralized technologies could enable banks and financial institutions to become more efficient. It looks at the potential impact of company-backed virtual currencies (such as Facebook's Libra) and how governments and regulators around the world are reacting to these innovations. With discussion of the principles of tokenomics and the difference between public and private blockchains, The Cryptocurrency Revolution is the essential guide for those wishing to understand the threats and opportunities of the changing world of payments and finance.

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies

Author: Arvind Narayanan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400884152
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Book Description
An authoritative introduction to the exciting new technologies of digital money Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies provides a comprehensive introduction to the revolutionary yet often misunderstood new technologies of digital currency. Whether you are a student, software developer, tech entrepreneur, or researcher in computer science, this authoritative and self-contained book tells you everything you need to know about the new global money for the Internet age. How do Bitcoin and its block chain actually work? How secure are your bitcoins? How anonymous are their users? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? These are some of the many questions this book answers. It begins by tracing the history and development of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and then gives the conceptual and practical foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network as well as to integrate ideas from Bitcoin into your own projects. Topics include decentralization, mining, the politics of Bitcoin, altcoins and the cryptocurrency ecosystem, the future of Bitcoin, and more. An essential introduction to the new technologies of digital currency Covers the history and mechanics of Bitcoin and the block chain, security, decentralization, anonymity, politics and regulation, altcoins, and much more Features an accompanying website that includes instructional videos for each chapter, homework problems, programming assignments, and lecture slides Also suitable for use with the authors' Coursera online course Electronic solutions manual (available only to professors)

Kings of Crypto

Author: Jeff John Roberts
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1647820197
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
"Tech writer Roberts debuts with a page-turning account of the rise of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase from the Y Combinator startup incubator to becoming a 'pillar of the larger crypto economy.'" — Publisher's Weekly For a moment late in 2018, one bitcoin, which physically amounts to a few electrons blipping on a tiny bit of silicon, was worth $20,000—the same as a pound of gold. Libertarian technologists who believed bitcoin would be the foundation of a new world order saw the moment as an apotheosis. Everyone else saw a bubble. Everyone else was right, and the bubble burst. But bitcoin survived, and the battle for its soul rages on. Kings of Crypto drops us into the unfolding drama, tracing the rise, fall, and rebirth of cryptocurrency through the experiences of major players across the globe. We follow Silicon Valley entrepreneur Brian Armstrong and the turbulent rocket ride of his startup, Coinbase, as he tries to take bitcoin mainstream while fighting off hackers, thieves, and zealots. Author Jeff John Roberts keenly observes the world of virtual currencies and what happens when startups try to disrupt the world of high finance. Clear explanations of crypto technology are woven into an amazing landscape full of meme-fueled startup hijinks, hacking (so much hacking!), shady investors, government investigations, billionaire bros and their Lambos, and closed-door meetings with Jamie Dimon. This is the surprising story of the origins of cryptocurrency and how it is changing money forever.

The Politics of Bitcoin

Author: David Golumbia
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452953813
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 107

Book Description
Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought. The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Tracers in the Dark

Author: Andy Greenberg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385548109
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
From the award-winning author of Sandworm comes the propulsive story of a new breed of investigators who have cracked the Bitcoin blockchain, exposing once-anonymous realms of money, drugs, and violence. “I love the book… It reads like a thriller… These stories are amazing.” (Michael Lewis) Over the last decade, a single innovation has massively fueled digital black markets: cryptocurrency. Crime lords inhabiting lawless corners of the internet have operated more freely—whether in drug dealing, money laundering, or human trafficking—than their analog counterparts could have ever dreamed of. By transacting not in dollars or pounds but in currencies with anonymous ledgers, overseen by no government, beholden to no bankers, these black marketeers have sought to rob law enforcement of their chief method of cracking down on illicit finance: following the money. But what if the centerpiece of this dark economy held a secret, fatal flaw? What if their currency wasn’t so cryptic after all? An investigator using the right mixture of technical wizardry, financial forensics, and old-fashioned persistence could uncover an entire world of wrongdoing. Tracers in the Dark is a story of crime and pursuit unlike any other. With unprecedented access to the major players in federal law enforcement and private industry, veteran cybersecurity reporter Andy Greenberg tells an astonishing saga of criminal empires built and destroyed. He introduces an IRS agent with a defiant streak, a Bitcoin-tracing Danish entrepreneur, and a colorful ensemble of hardboiled agents and prosecutors as they delve deep into the crypto-underworld. The result is a thrilling, globe-spanning story of dirty cops, drug bazaars, trafficking rings, and the biggest takedown of an online narcotics market in the history of the Internet. Utterly of our time, Tracers in the Dark is a cat-and-mouse story and a tale of a technological one-upmanship. Filled with canny maneuvering and shocking twists, it answers a provocative question: How would some of the world’s most brazen criminals behave if they were sure they could never get caught?

Digital Cash

Author: Finn Brunton
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691209162
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
The fascinating untold story of digital cash and its creators—from experiments in the 1970s to the mania over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies Bitcoin may appear to be a revolutionary form of digital cash without precedent or prehistory. In fact, it is only the best-known recent experiment in a long line of similar efforts going back to the 1970s. But the story behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and its blockchain technology has largely been untold—until now. In Digital Cash, Finn Brunton reveals how technological utopians and political radicals created experimental money to bring about their visions of the future: to protect privacy, bring down governments, prepare for apocalypse, or launch a civilization of innovation and abundance that would make its creators immortal. Filled with marvelous characters, stories, and ideas, Digital Cash is an engaging and accessible account of the strange origins and remarkable technologies behind today's cryptocurrency explosion.

Crypto

Author: Steven Levy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101199466
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 604

Book Description
If you've ever made a secure purchase with your credit card over the Internet, then you have seen cryptography, or "crypto", in action. From Stephen Levy—the author who made "hackers" a household word—comes this account of a revolution that is already affecting every citizen in the twenty-first century. Crypto tells the inside story of how a group of "crypto rebels"—nerds and visionaries turned freedom fighters—teamed up with corporate interests to beat Big Brother and ensure our privacy on the Internet. Levy's history of one of the most controversial and important topics of the digital age reads like the best futuristic fiction.

Crypto Asset Investing in the Age of Autonomy

Author: Jake Ryan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119705363
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
Competition, the drive for efficiency, and continuous improvement ultimately push businesses toward automation and later towards autonomy. If a business can operate without human intervention, it will minimize its operational cost. If Uber can remove the expense of a driver with an autonomous vehicle, it will provide its service cheaper than a competitor who can’t. If an artificially intelligent trading company can search, find, and take advantage of some arbitrage opportunity, then it can profit where its competitors cannot. A business that can analyze and execute in real-time without needing to wait for a human to act, is a business that will be able to take advantage of brief inefficiencies from other markets or businesses. This trend following a thesis that is based on 100 years of proven economic theory. Short-wave economic cycles, those 5- to 10-year cycles, are driven by credit but the long-wave economic cycles, those 50- to 60-year cycles, are driven by technological revolution. We’ve had 5 cycles over the past 200 years with the last wave, the Age of Information & Telecommunications. We've seen evidence that a new cycle has begun. Technological revolutions come by way of a cluster of new innovations. About a decade ago, you started to see AI, robotics and IoT (sensors) delivering on automation. That’s been powerful, but not transformational. It does not force businesses to fundamentally change how they do business. The last piece of the puzzle was cryptocurrency because it allows us to process and transfer economic value without human intervention. Soon, there will be a global race to build autonomous operations. Businesses and organizations without autonomous operations simply will not be able to compete with those that do because ... autonomy is the ultimate competitive advantage. Crypto is the mechanism that will accrue value from being the infrastructure for the next digital financial revolution. Crypto Asset Investing lays out a case that we’ve begun a new technological revolution similar to the Internet Age of the 1990’s. Artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, robotics and cryptocurrency are converging to deliver on a new age, what I call the Age of Autonomy. Understanding the transformation that’s taken place before anyone else can yield enormous investment opportunity. In this book, you’ll learn how and why to invest in crypto assets.

The Truth Machine

Author: Paul Vigna
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1250304172
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
"Views differ on bitcoin, but few doubt the transformative potential of Blockchain technology. The Truth Machine is the best book so far on what has happened and what may come along. It demands the attention of anyone concerned with our economic future." —Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard, Former Treasury Secretary From Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, the authors of The Age of Cryptocurrency, comes the definitive work on the Internet’s Next Big Thing: The Blockchain. Big banks have grown bigger and more entrenched. Privacy exists only until the next hack. Credit card fraud is a fact of life. Many of the “legacy systems” once designed to make our lives easier and our economy more efficient are no longer up to the task. Yet there is a way past all this—a new kind of operating system with the potential to revolutionize vast swaths of our economy: the blockchain. In The Truth Machine, Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna demystify the blockchain and explain why it can restore personal control over our data, assets, and identities; grant billions of excluded people access to the global economy; and shift the balance of power to revive society’s faith in itself. They reveal the disruption it promises for industries including finance, tech, legal, and shipping. Casey and Vigna expose the challenge of replacing trusted (and not-so-trusted) institutions on which we’ve relied for centuries with a radical model that bypasses them. The Truth Machine reveals the empowerment possible when self-interested middlemen give way to the transparency of the blockchain, while highlighting the job losses, assertion of special interests, and threat to social cohesion that will accompany this shift. With the same balanced perspective they brought to The Age of Cryptocurrency, Casey and Vigna show why we all must care about the path that blockchain technology takes—moving humanity forward, not backward.

Crypto Wars

Author: Craig Jarvis
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000284867
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
The crypto wars have raged for half a century. In the 1970s, digital privacy activists prophesied the emergence of an Orwellian State, made possible by computer-mediated mass surveillance. The antidote: digital encryption. The U.S. government warned encryption would not only prevent surveillance of law-abiding citizens, but of criminals, terrorists, and foreign spies, ushering in a rival dystopian future. Both parties fought to defend the citizenry from what they believed the most perilous threats. The government tried to control encryption to preserve its surveillance capabilities; privacy activists armed citizens with cryptographic tools and challenged encryption regulations in the courts. No clear victor has emerged from the crypto wars. Governments have failed to forge a framework to govern the, at times conflicting, civil liberties of privacy and security in the digital age—an age when such liberties have an outsized influence on the citizen–State power balance. Solving this problem is more urgent than ever. Digital privacy will be one of the most important factors in how we architect twenty-first century societies—its management is paramount to our stewardship of democracy for future generations. We must elevate the quality of debate on cryptography, on how we govern security and privacy in our technology-infused world. Failure to end the crypto wars will result in societies sleepwalking into a future where the citizen–State power balance is determined by a twentieth-century status quo unfit for this century, endangering both our privacy and security. This book provides a history of the crypto wars, with the hope its chronicling sets a foundation for peace.