-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 3:13 PM -0600 on 12/7/00, Somebody wrote:
I have enjoyed your contributions to the cypherpunks mailing list, and have noticed that you are very knowledgeable, particularly about the subject of anonymous digital currency. I was hoping that, if you have an opportunity, you could provide me with a list of published works you recommend for gaining more knowledge about the concepts behind anonymous digital currency and it's associated problems. I have referenced your web sites, and I am working may way through your Geodesic Economy writings. Any other sources you recommend would be very helpful.
Thank you. What a very nice thing to say. Cool. Fan mail. There are lots
more people on cypherpunks, the above lists, and other places, who know
way more about both finance and crypto than I do. However, I do try to
make it up in enthusiasm, if not quality...
I've bashed out bibliographies for people before, and this one may be
different, but here's something to start out with.
Probably I'd start out with Schneier's Applied Cryptography, making a
beeline for the digital cash section. I've heard that the pros now use
the CRC handbook of crypto, but this is the one I read first, when it
came out in 1994 or so. It's the closest thing cypherpunks have to a Boy
Scout Handbook.
Then, I'd go to the Springer-Verlag site and order all the proceedings of
the Financial Cryptography conferences since 1997. That, in theory,
should back up all the grandiose claims I make in the Geodesic Economy
articles on the IBUC site. Or, at least, I wave my hands in their general
direction...
Having read those, you now know everything I pretend know about
cryptography, financial or other. :-).
Then, I'd get a good history of money. My favorite these days is Gwynn
Davies', um, "A History of Money". It's a marvellous tome of everything
money.
After that, I'd go get some finance in my head. The following stuff is
dated, and there may be better, but it's what I ended up reading back
then, and, at the very least, some of them are good pointers to more
recent stuff. In the pre-Amazon days, I'd say go to a good college
bookstore to find them, but now, we know better, right? :-).
First off, I'd start with "Capital Ideas", a nice, and completely verbal,
history of the rise of modern financial theory, from about 10 years ago,
written by one of the premier academic editors in finance.
After that, I'd get Fabbozzi's Fixed Income Mathematics, a small book as
Fabbozzi's books go, but packed with lots of geeky finance formulae to
turn into code, and what they all mean. Then, for fun, and so I had
something to discuss with grey-haired guys in suits, I'd read Graham and
Dodd's "The Intellegent Investor", sort of the principia
(non-)mathematica of value investing, still relevant three-quarters of a
century after it's writing, the touchstone of people like Warren Buffett.
Finally, I'd go read what an MBA knows :-), and get Sharpe's
"Investments" and follow it up with Brealey and Meyers' "Corporate
Finance".
For politics, I'd go read David Freidman, son of Milton, well-known
law-and-economic professor and anarcho-capitalist. "The Machinery of
Freedom" is a good start, because his thesis there is that we really
don't need the nation-state for much. It's a pre-crypto book,
1970-something, and now that we think we know how to get there from here,
it's a good idea to read a serious modern treatment of anarchy without
19th century pictures of swarthy European-Americans throwing bombs at
guys in spats.
In that vein, I'd also take a look at "Njall's Saga", an Icelandic saga
about a, um, turn of the last-millenium multi-generation blood-feud :-),
(the Penguin version is a good one), for a nice non-state governance
example. And, of course, there's Vernor Vinge's story "The Ungoverned"
for a more modern take on the same.
The final political book is, Hayek's 50-year-old, and completely
prescient, classic "The Road to Serfdom". Hayek's a good place to stop,
because he's also a gateway to the so-called "Austrian" economists, like
von Mises, who, while disdaining what they called "scientism" --
over-reliance on mathematical economics -- also believed, quite
strenuously, in private currency. Hayek's arch-nemesis Keynes, of course,
never saw a nation-state he didn't like, and thought that private
currency should be illegal...
There.
How's that?
Cheers,
RAH
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga