Bitcoin and Co.: what remains of the hype

In 2014, at the age of just 19, he then founded Ethereum – the basis for Ether. Today, Buterin’s idea is worth billions, and Ethereum smart contracts form the basis for NFT artworks, virtual real estate, and decentralized organizations.

Buterin sees the possibility of a new kind of “economic democracy” in cryptocurrencies. As he put his vision in a 2014 text: “So now could be the perfect time for a powerful, technology-enhanced comeback for social currencies, and they could even grow well beyond their role in the 19th and 20th centuries and into a strong mainstream – become a force in the world economy.”

His book is a collection of writings written by Buterin, which the US journalist Nathan Schneider is now publishing and classifying as an introduction. He praises Buterin’s spirit of innovation, but also sees his positions marked by contradictions: “On the one hand, he shows completely new ways for people to organize themselves, on the other hand, he refrains from expressing any opinion regarding the use of this power by people,” writes Schneider.

This pretty much sums up the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Buterin explains chronologically and in detail his vision of a social currency, a decentralized one in which power is shared among as many people as possible. At the same time, however, he admits that Ethereum, like comparable systems, is based on the assumption that people are selfish.

The reality check is therefore missing, as is Buterin’s positioning. His remarks remain mostly in the descriptive.

A kind of company history

Schneider selected the essays that were written between January 2014 and January 2022 together with Buterin. Basically, they are a kind of company history – from the idea to the foundation to further development.

The book itself is easy to consume because it is divided into many shorter essays. However, this is also necessary with a not entirely catchy topic, long sentences and often technical language.

Buterin has a vision, that’s clear. He’s not someone who wallows in success – not only because he hasn’t had a permanent address for ten years and travels the country with a single bag with all his belongings. He also wants to develop his project further.

This was recently shown by the energy-saving process he devised for creating cryptocurrencies, which is called “Proof of Stake” and differs from the energy-intensive “Proof of Work” used in Bitcoin. This is also the title of the English edition, which was published in the autumn at the same time as the “Proof of Stake” procedure.

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But how a chapter with a presentation of online games that you can play with friends at Christmas time – chess, tic tac toe or poker – fits into the explanations, that seems rather bizarre.

A small fly in the ointment is that the latest developments in the crypto market are not discussed at all – the last essay is more than a year old. The fact that the once third-largest crypto exchange FTX gambled away customers’ money and went bankrupt, the price slumps in the wake of the Ukraine war, rising inflation and the Fed’s rapid interest rate hikes – all this is left out.

The essays in which Buterin becomes concrete are particularly exciting. For example in the one about crypto cities, in which he describes real projects where blockchain is used – and leads to improvements. Overall, however, the scriptures fail to explain how some kind of new social order is to emerge from a system that is used by only a fraction of the people.

Buterin gets stuck too much in theory for long stretches. But what the book offers is a readable insight into the thoughts of an unquestionably visionary thinker.

Allusion to “Matrix” movies

Quite different with Ijoma Mangold. What Buterin lacks in terms of positioning, there is too much in Mangold’s “The Orange Pill”. With his book, the author makes himself the supreme prophet of the crypto industry, whose messages he passes on unfiltered.

Frighteningly uncritically, Mangold makes no secret of the fact that he does not want to inform his readers in a balanced way, but wants to convert them: “This book wants you, dear reader, to get orange pills by telling how I myself was georange pilled.”

With this, Mangold alludes to the film “Matrix”, in which swallowing the blue pill means continuing to live in the status quo, while swallowing the red pill promises the ultimate truth. “Because the color of bitcoin is orange, whoever is convinced bitcoin will take us out of the clown world of debt and financial derivatives and negative interest rates and asset price inflation and all that jazz has swallowed the orange pill.”

Mangold’s book is entertaining and easy to read; the explanations about the history of Bitcoin’s ideas and the question of how the various Bitcoin fan communities with different socio-political backgrounds work towards a common goal are also important. Most importantly, the book, written from a first-person perspective, is insightful reading for anyone wanting to understand how people fall for the crypto world.