Crypto Untangled

A new book about crypto for the curious skeptic.

Today, I’m launching my second book, Crypto Untangled. Pair it with my first book, AI Untangled, and gift a fun book set for the holidays.

I spent the entire first year of Untangled exploring and critiquing crypto. In 2021, crypto had captured the public imagination — technical decentralization would reduce the power of Big Tech, pseudonymity would enable real privacy, and smart contracts would obviate the need to trust whoever you’re transacting with. But this future didn’t pan out. Instead, key players in the industry committed fraud and stole customer’s money, while others bet on the future value of jpegs. In turn, crypto became synonymous with fraud and casino-like behavior.

If you’re following the news, though, you might be wondering, is crypto back? What is going on? Should you care? Well, President Trump won on a pro-crypto platform, and across the board, crypto-backed candidates won Senate and House seats. Bitcoin skyrocketed passed its all time high, as millions of dollars flow each day into one of the Securities and Exchange Commission approved ETFs. At the same time, there are new blockchain enabled projects changing how value is created and distributed within a network. I’m not here to say ‘crypto is back.’ It’s not. The crypto industry has a long road ahead to earn the public’s trust and create real value.

But I wrote Crypto Untangled because just as crypto’s path of crime and gambling wasn’t predetermined, neither is its future. The gap between technological adoption and social change is massive in crypto — if its adherents care to close it, they must shed their techno-solutionist mindset and confront how power is distributed across protocols and the broader industry. They must interrogate the implications of their beliefs and values. They must understand and anticipate the dynamics generated by the interaction of blockchains, tokens, and social systems.

I wrote Crypto Untangled for two audiences: people who want to understand what in the world is going on in crypto and industry participants who want to confront its blindspots head-on. This book is a collection of essays I’ve written over the last three years, broken down into thematic chapters — power, beliefs, and dynamics.

Power

Power is invisible until it’s not -- until we interrogate the claims made about technology. In this section, I explore the theme of power -- how it interacts with blockchain technology, how it is wielded through narratives within the crypto community, and how it shapes our experience of crypto. Along the way, I explain concepts like decentralization, pseudonymity, identity, and overview research concepts and frameworks like techno-determinism, Afrofuturism, and context collapse.

Beliefs

Technologies aren’t neutral — they don’t originate out of thin air. They are informed by the values and beliefs of their creators and how those interact with the values in a given society. In this section, I explore the ideologies, values, and systems of belief that shape cryptography and blockchain technology. In particular, I analyze what a belief in ‘trustless’ systems means, how ‘digital ownership’ depends on a system of belief, and how ‘speculation,’ a belief and action wrapped in one, is fundamentally shaping both crypto and modern societies. Along the way, I overview research concepts and frameworks like affordance theory and imagined communities.

Dynamics

Understanding the parts of a complex ecosystem won't help you understand how the system behaves. The macro behavior of a system can only be interrogated by understanding its dynamics. In this section, I explore the theme of dynamics -- how new incentives, institutions, and feedback loops are likely to shape crypto communities and ecosystem outcomes. Along the way, I explain topics like social tokens, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), decentralized finance (DeFi), and decentralized physical infrastructure (DePin) and explore concepts explore conceptual frameworks like normal accidents, moral crumple zones, and strict churches.

I hope you enjoy it,

Charley