Blockland: 21 Stories of Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency

100% roller-coaster ride, Blockland succeeds amazingly in both mythologizing and explaining the current state of the cryptocurrency industry... This is the cryptocurrency book for people who are too cool to read cryptocurrency books. - Cointelegraph As an industry insider and a social scientist by training, Elias Ahonen "gives an even and unbiased view of the space in a manner that is both easily accessible and utterly charming. There is no papering-over of the darker elements of cryptocurrency." The crypto-anarchist philosophical origins of Bitcoin Intertwined stories of 50 digital currencies Tales from the cryptocurrency mining industry How the Dark Web drug dealers gave Bitcoin its wings Billion-dollar heists of digital money The tribal and religious nature of the splintered crypto-culture Bitcoin's civil wars and Ethereum's ideological crisis Account of the making and aftermath of the 2018 ICO bubble Analysis of the global governmental reception of Blockchain How Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Decentralized Applications (dApps), Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) present a new wave of disruption And much more! Elias Ahonen was described as "one of the first Bitcoin historians" by Bitcoin.com for his 2016 Encyclopedia of Physical Bitcoins and Crypto-Currencies. Though he started professional life as an IT analyst and North Korea geopolitical researcher, he found himself in a whimsical seven-year career as an international blockchain consultant and dealer of million-dollar Bitcoin art, the story of which Cointelegraph labelled as perhaps "cryptocurrency's first rock'n'roll biography". His gonzo-style memoir serves as an intimate backdrop to the bigger story.