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Shermin Voshmgir, July 19 2025
This book is a condensed version of the Bitcoin related chapters from the third edition of the book Token Economy. It’s a standalone volume for all those readers who want to understand Bitcoin on its own terms—outside the hype, and without the noise of the broader crypto universe.
If you already own Token Economy (Third Edition), you won’t need this book. If you read the first or second edition of Token Economy, you might, because the third edition went much deeper into analyzing the social and economic realities of Bitcoin today versus what it was meant to be.
Why write a Bitcoin Book?
You might ask yourself why I chose to distill this book from an existing well selling book. Even though other blockchain networks, tokenization, and decentralized applications are evolving rapidly, public attention still fixates on Bitcoin—and unfortunately often gets the narrative wrong. The focus is always on the price.
Over the years, I’ve received countless interview requests from traditional media and new media, that spiked whenever Bitcoin’s price skyrocketed or collapsed. But few, especially in traditional media, wanted to talk about the Bitcoin network as a socio-economic paradigm or as foundational infrastructure for a new generation Internet. More often than not they just wanted to know: Is it real money? Does it have value? Should we invest?
If you want to understand crypto, you need to understand Bitcoin
Whenever I tried to explain the deeper implications, attention would drift. The nuanced parts were often cut out of the interview. Everyone was FOMOing out on the big bucks to be made, or trying to report to those who are. I was sick of it, stopped giving interviews and wrote the third edition of Token Economy, and now the Bitcoin distillation of it.
This book caters to all those who are interested in Bitcoin from a multidimensional perspective. Even if you want to understand the broader crypto ecosystem, you first need to fully understand Bitcoin.
Why it Matters?
Bitcoin was born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. It was a direct response to a system where trust had been eroded, institutions had failed, and monetary policy and traditional financial systems had become opaque and unaccountable. What began as an obscure experiment in P2P electronic cash has grown into a global phenomenon that challenges how we think about money, governance, and power. More than a technical breakthrough, Bitcoin was meant as a critique of the status quo: an open-source revolt against centralized control of money, surveillance capitalism, and the quiet erosion of privacy in the digital age.
Unfortunately, however, fifteen years after its inception, the reality of the Bitcoin ecosystem and usage is a far cry from its original ideals: Most Bitcoin owners don’t control their own wallets or private keys. Exchanges have become the new banks of Web3. Reintermediation is everywhere, even though disintermediation was the goal. Power is concentrated around code contributions, in mining infrastructure, and in gatekeeping institutions that were never supposed to exist. Politics have taken over protocol upgrades, and what was meant to disrupt surveillance capitalism risks becoming part of its machinery. That is, unless we pay attention.
If you want to understand this shift, you need to read the book. It explores Bitcoin not just as software, but as a form of political resistance and explores how a decentralized network of machines came to embody new ideas about economic coordination, governance, and digital sovereignty.