Robert M. Townsend

much of the content is too technical for me, and i could not recommend to others. writing could have been improved with more vivid examples being reused across chapters to illuminate different aspects of the technology in memorable ways: eg, alice wants to buy a goat from bob. unfortunately the imagined reader is an economist familiar with things like monetary theory and mechanism design, so examples and vivid explanations are sorely lacking. nevertheless i found it useful summary of the main concepts and claims coming from the distributed ledger tech (DLT) crowd precisely because it isn't pitched at the usual reader in these topics. a virtue is that the emphasis is less on speculative novel uses of DLT and more on known issues in pre-DLT world that could be addressed with them.

thankfully absent from the book are the usual shitty political hobbyhorses of the crypto crowd--crank neo goldbugism and the ancap-flavored obsession with decentralization for its own sake. there is a defense of cryptocurrency and smart contracts as useful supplements to ordinary fiat currency and paper contracts. that said, neolib economists have their own hobbyhorses like microfinance, which i am unsure about.

one point i found especially interesting (tho briefly treated) is the need to translate between human-readable and machine-readable contracts. googling reveals some of the projects mentioned in the text as working on this are now defunct -- uh oh.

Best parts related distributed ledgers to historical inventions like tally sticks, islamic banking with trusted lenders, databases, M-Pesa in Kenya, double-entry bookkeeping, and balance sheets for firms. none of these comparisons are new, appearing in more popular books, but this book explains how DLT offers some new features these earlier technologies did not: eg, ensuring consistency between balance sheets kept by counter-parties (bob's sale is alice's purchase) and the utility of those features (public log of transactions facilitates lending based on anticipated cash flows, to bob's benefit here; or optimizing government money supply, to everyone's benefit). it also call attention to fact that DLT cannot escape long-appreciated constraints of other tech like databases: the CAP theorem says among consistency, accuracy, partitioning one must choose two.

i do not wish to read more on this topic for some time, and i suppose that is a credit to this book.… (plus d'informations)