My understanding and appreciation of bitcoin has been shaped by a handful of essays that brilliantly capture its unique properties and potential.


Here's my reading list:


⛪The Bitcoin Reformation by Tuur Demeester
"The 21st century emergence of Bitcoin, encryption, the internet, and millennials are more than just trends; they herald a wave of change.."


👑Masters and Slaves of Money by Robert Breedlove 
"An exclusive right to produce money without regard for competitive market pressures is an apparatus of enslavement"


🥇Bitcoin Obsoletes All Other Money by Parker Lewis
"It does not matter how complex bitcoin is. At the end of the day, bitcoin becomes an A/B test. The need for money is real and individuals will converge on the form of money that best fulfills the function of exchange."


🏎️Economics of Bitcoin as a Settlement Network by Saifedean Ammous
“Using Bitcoin for consumer purchases is akin to driving a Concorde jet down the street to pick up groceries: a ridiculously expensive waste of an astonishing tool."


💯The Bitcoin Central Bank’s Perfect Monetary Policy by Pierre Rochard
"The BCB enforces the strictest deposit regulations in the world by requiring full reserves for all accounts."


🐂The Bullish Case for Bitcoin by Vijay Boyapati
"If Bitcoin exists for 20 years, there will be near-universal confidence that it will be available forever, much as people believe the Internet is a permanent feature of the modern world."


🏴‍☠️Bitcoin Becomes the Flag of Technology by Balaji
"Bitcoin is not about accomplishing change through folk activism. It's a network-based phenomenon which has accomplished a revolution in monetary policy through a billion private actions."


🛑Can Governments Stop Bitcoin? by Alex Gladstein
"The rich and powerful will always design systems that benefit them before everyone else. The genius of Bitcoin is to take advantage of that.."


⏱️Bitcoin is Time by Gigi
"if we want to have trust­less money in the digital realm, we must remove any entity that creates and manages timestamps and any single entity that is in charge of time itself."


😈Everyone’s A Scammer by Michael Goldstein 
"Long term investors should use Bitcoin as their unit of account and every single investment should be compared to the expected returns of Bitcoin."


🛶Bitcoin is Venice by Allen Farrington
"Modern banking is the legacy of a problem that technology has since solved. [Bitcoin] is a foundation to scale the next great phase of economic progress."


🖨️Stone Ridge Shareholder Letter (2020) by Ross Stevens
"You can stay on the Fiat Standard, in which some people get to produce unlimited new units of money for free, just not you. Or opt in to the Bitcoin Standard, in which no one gets to do that, including you."


📡Bitcoin Miners Beware by StopAndDecrypt
"No matter who you are, or how big your company is, your transaction won’t propagate if it’s invalid."


🧩Bitcoin Is Worse Is Better by Gwern
"The interesting thing is that all the pieces were in place for at least 8 years before Satoshi’s publication.."


🎓Why the Yuppie Elite Dismiss Bitcoin by Jesse Myers
"When you’re in the ivory tower, you think the term 'ivory tower' is a silly misrepresentation of your very normal life; when you’re no longer in the ivory tower, you realize how willfully out of touch you were with the world."


🧰Decentralization: Why Dumb Networks are Better by Andreas Antonopolous
"Bitcoin allows any application to be developed independently, without permission, on the edge of the network."


🐚Shelling Out: The Origins of Money by Nick Szabo
"if money is not just coins or notes issued by a government under legal tender laws, but rather can be a wide variety of objects – then just what is money anyway?"


🪨It’s the Settlement Assurances, Stupid by Nic Carter
"You can create something which looks cosmetically similar to Bitcoin, but you cannot replicate the settlement assurances which derive from the costliness of the ledger."


🦈The Greatest Game by Jeff Booth
"The best way for people to understand how important Bitcoin is for the future, is to first understand how the existing system amplifies insecurity and how a change to a different monetary policy would produce infinitely better results."


⚖️Bitcoin Reveals Exchange Rate Manipulation and Detects Capital Controls by Gina Pieters
"Bitcoin can approximate unofficial exchange rates which, in turn, can be used to detect both the existence and the magnitude of the distortion caused by capital controls and exchange rate manipulations."


🫂Bitcoin and Me by Hal Finney
"When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs."

Links to all essays: https://www.teachingbtc.com/essays/