Resistance Money is a piece of world-class scholarship that illuminates bitcoin's role in the world today as a way of resisting oppression. It is an open-minded academic exploration of bitcoin's technology, incentive structure, externalities, and global impact. The book is accessible to all, including those with no previous knowledge of bitcoin. It will leave them packed with insights about the rise of Satoshi's new monetary technology and where it might take us tomorrow.
-Alex Gladstein, Human Rights Foundation
Resistance Money is a well-researched and thoughtful literary achievement, reminding us that Bitcoin is the best money for everyone because it is brilliantly engineered to serve as money for anyone.
–Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy
In a world where bitcoin's success is often equated solely with dollar price action, Resistance Money presents a refreshing perspective. Rather than fixating on Number Go Up, this thoughtful book introduces an alternative yardstick for assessing bitcoin's true impact: its potential for fostering prosocial change. Resistance Money explores the myriad plausible benefits that bitcoin could offer, challenging both critics and advocates to look beyond surface-level metrics and evaluate, on their own terms, whether bitcoin has the capacity to fulfill its promises of empowerment and societal transformation.
-Micah Warren, University of Oregon and author of Bitcoin: A Game-Theoretic Analysis
For those curious about why bitcoiners believe in bitcoin's transformative power, this book serves as a critical guide. It breaks down complex concepts into understandable insights and doesn't shy away from the tough questions, making it a valuable read for skeptics and believers alike. If you're on the fence about bitcoin, this might just be the book that opens your eyes to its possibilities.
-Jerry Brito, Coin Center
Resistance Money is a deep dive on bitcoin and its implications by three philosophy professors. The technology gets the professional treatment that it deserves, and in a very concise form relative to its depth.
-Lyn Alden, Lyn Alden Investment Strategy
The most thought-provoking book I’ve read in years... original, fresh, deep, broad, and much needed.
—Noelle Acheson, Crypto is Macro Now
... this entire book is a measured thought experiment into truly determining how you feel about bitcoin in the world... I would never have considered taking the philosophical approach. But over the course of these three-hundred-odd pages, I’ve slowly been convinced that most other ways of assessing bitcoin’s worth are not only wrong, but often pointless... The copious evidence put forward in the more detailed chapters on bitcoin’s role in privacy, censorship and freedom means that you are unlikely to come to the bitcoin-less world conclusion if you have truly kept an open mind while considering this particular book’s arguments... I don’t think that the bitcoin-positive message should prevent any crypto skeptics from learning from this text.
-Molly Zuckerman, Blockworks
"... the best bitcoin book I've ever read. It's intellectually honest, it's accessible, it makes no offerings or ritualistic sacrifices to the cargo cult. It's just... great. I love it... I recommend this book for everyone."
-Mike Brock, TBD
Resistance Money shows why bitcoin is necessary and beneficial in our modern world. It is academically rigorous, but readable by all. This book is a strong foundation for anyone who wants to better understand bitcoin, regardless of ideology. As a policymaker in the U.S. Senate, I pride myself on our core American values of freedom, privacy, and self-reliance. Resistance Money explains how bitcoin embodies these qualities at a global level, and I am excited to share it with my Congressional colleagues from across the political spectrum.
–Senator Cynthia Lummis (WY)
Have you ever wanted someone to explain this bitcoin thing—the good, the bad, and the truly weird—without also trying to sell you something? Then this is your book. Balanced, exhaustively researched, and fully engaging the cultists, critics, and engineers alike, Resistance Money informs without inflaming and teaches without preaching. The thesis is that despite some well-publicized ill effects, this technology makes the world a better place. But the authors also leave room for you, the reader, to disagree. It’s also—unlike many other groundbreaking works by academic philosophers—enjoyable to read. It’s at the very top of my suggested reading list for anyone curious and open-minded about bitcoin.
-Troy Cross, Reed College
Resistance Money may be the best bitcoin book you’ll ever read. It is a non-extremist defense of bitcoin. The authors don’t claim bitcoin will replace the U.S. dollar. They don’t claim bitcoin will put banks out of business. They don’t claim non-bitcoin financial assets are inherently fraudulent or fragile. In place of the bold and unsupported claims found in other bitcoin books, the authors offer a remarkably reasonable view: the world is better off with bitcoin than without it.
–William J. Luther, Florida Atlantic University
Resistance Money is the most-accessible and engaging bitcoin book to date. It will appeal to novices and veterans alike who want to understand why bitcoin was created and why it is a singular new technology. The authors are experienced educators, and the book is perfectly pitched for the classroom and for students encountering bitcoin for the first time. Finally, Resistance Money will serve the wider crypto world, and anyone hoping to learn why the bitcoin community is so passionately committed to it alone.
—Paul J. Dylan-Ennis, University College Dublin
...a calm and serious book, accessible to curious beginners and those not already sold on bitcoin as a quick-fix for every societal ill... Resistance Money isn’t a libertarian book, singing the free market case for bitcoin or musings about a collapsing dollar. Such books exist. The trio, explicitly not libertarians, instead try to create something bigger. They investigate not whether the things bitcoin breaks are worth breaking, but “whether we ought to prefer a world with bitcoin to a world without bitcoin.” They do so prudently and thoroughly, using the philosopher’s tool of [John Harsanyi's] veil of ignorance... We need serious books about money and bitcoin. Resistance Money is precisely that.
-Joakim Book, American Institute for Economic Research
"Instead of speaking over Bitcoin's detractors, the book speaks with them and sprinkles objections to Bitcoin's rise along the way, culminating in a chapter solely dedicated to the critiques - from more specific concerns about the centralization of Lightning Network and miners to the politics it is currently associated with, as well as the distribution of it... Overall, Resistance Money gives Bitcoin the serious, measured perspective it now deserves. Gone are the days of purely technical writing, or writing that preaches to the choir - Resistance Money augers a shift in how Bitcoin is treated in the same vein as other writers have applied to its history, from the Blocksize Wars to its cypherpunk roots to its monetary economics and its push for deflation. It's well worth adding to the canon of books that go beyond just defining Bitcoin and applying new analysis and synthesis to it - and Resistance Money deserves a spot on any bookshelf."
-Roger Huang, Forbes