Book Review: Lyn Alden - Broken Money

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This time there is only a 2 week gap between my last book review. It goes to show that I have been just reading, watching TV and gaming recently. I hope to be more active in the spring/summer. The weather has turned cold again, which isn't great. I have started to do some spring cleaning but have made time to keep up with my reading.

I am reading a few books at a time, depending where I leave them around the house. I've recently started War and Peace after watching Napoleon and that could take some time to finish! Anyhow, todays book review is the recently released book by Lyn Alden.

If you have followed any of Lyn's work, you would know she is crunching the numbers and providing lots of micro and macro type of analysis on not just Bitcoin, but the markets too.

It was then a great chance for me to pick up the book and give it a read. It is a big one with over 500 pages, so it wasn't some quick reading either. However, the book started very slowly with some very boring chapters and I thought oh no, this is going to be a bore fest and nothing useful here.

The first 4 chapters were really hard going, but luckily, they were not a pre-cursor to some later chapters in the book that were real gems. I am glad that I persisted because there were some great information tucked away and delivered in a really helpful manner to those researching Bitcoin, alts and the fiat monetary system from a more non-economics professor type of angle.

Whilst Jimmy Song's book cover a few of these topics, they were not so well back up with data and thoughtful analysis that you get in Lyn's book.

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It even answered some of the questions that you might have such as What's wrong with Ethereum?. Why is it not a replacement of Bitcoin or even a compliment of it. Lyn goes into some great details about it here. Of course everyone knows about the pre-mine etc., but this and more is explained why proof of stake chains, including Hive and inherently centralising which was pretty interesting for me. When I look at Ethereum and Hive, they are quite centralised and Lyn tells you why, and how it comes about and why that isn't a good thing.

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Lyn doesn't just cheerlead Bitcoin on without any critical thinking or analysis. She delivers many pages looking into known weaknesses and possible problems with Bitcoin. Not only through things like proof of work vs. proof of stake, but many of the possible frailities and lays them out for you and evaluates them. I appreciated these things as it is better to be aware of this than tread blindly not knowing about them.

Some of these discussed were quantum computing, political threats and lack of adoption. She openly discussed what in her view failure would look like, which I sort of agreed with.

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There were many interesting topics once you started getting into the meat of the book. Some of my favorites are the cantillon effect and the monetisation of Bitcoin in which Jimmy Song also discussed at length in his book. He discussed the cantillon effect in more depth and the myriad ways that it is used in the fiat system to debase and destroy our society. Lyn also touches it quite well in a complementary way.

It is about those who are close to the money printers getting all the benefits at the expense of others. Lyn also covers things such as the long term debt cycles in fiat and also how things might be different under a hard money system.

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The book has a huge wealth of useful information in many different topics that will interest anybody who has an interest in money, freedom, investing or generally trying to navigate the crypto world.

It is so well explained without that economics professor jargon that you can relate to it. Sometimes Lyn comes across quite heavy in her interviews, but in the book, it has the right balance of data and writing to implant the messages into your head.

You get the feeling that Lyn isn't gatekeeping you and is providing some solid information on the technology, financial world and side topics such as privacy and how they all relate to the money we use. In the end it comes down to a moral question and after reading this book, you can understand the risk environment and financial reasons to hodl Bitcoin.

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My next book has just been delivered and I will be diving into this in the next weeks during Easter and delivering a review afterwards. If you have any good book recommendations, leave them in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.

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All photos are my own.

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