Michael J. Casey

This a fascinating, thoughtful and insightful study of "Guerrillero Heroico," the famous photograph of Che Guevara taken by Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960. Without ever losing sight of the political and ideological ironies underpinning the legacy of the photo, Michael Casey has developed a clear-eyed narrative of the photo's cultural history; including its uses as propaganda, art, intellectual property, spiritual talisman and a conveyor of sacred values.

Shelved appropriately in the "Cultural show more Studies" section of bookstores, this is decidedly not a political science book or a lopsided polemic. Nor is it an extended exercise in art criticism. The central story, which involves the evolution of an icon, is not one that can be easily shunted into previously existing genres. In a sense, there is no template for writing this story and Casey does a phenomenal job of elucidating his subject while showing unwavering respect for those most invested (emotionally and financially) in Guerrillero Heroico. show less

This could have been good, but they got enough details wrong (not due to facts changing, but just sloppiness and bad editing), plus a huge amount of filler (half of the book?) that it wouldn’t be worthwhile for most people. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of other better books about cryptocurrency beyond the initial bitcoin and basic blockchain tech level.

I’m a relative expert in this topic (involved in anonymous electronic cash and similar projects since 1992, currently working in the show more cryptocurrency space in technology and security) so I was already familiar with essentially all of the content in the book. The problem with a book like this is that in addition to constantly moving goalposts, a lot of projects are rather deceptive, and if you write about things with too high a level of credulity it will ultimately be misleading. There is probably some value in just summarizing what projects say they intend to do, but a lot more value in actual analysis.

The “fluff” level was high, but there was probably a solid 50-100 page book inside. If that had been combined with some deeper analysis of projects, technology, and results, it would be worth reading. show less

Books dealing with economic issues always challenge me. To me, they tend to be dry, academic, mundane. Yet economic issues affect us all, so having an understanding of the issues is important. So I continue to try reading various books on the economy in an attempt to better understand today's economic issues, e.g., the economic collapse of Wall Street and the U.S. economy in 2008, why the Bush Administration authorized the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to bail out Wall Street and show more Chrysler & General Motors, how the U.S. debt affects our economic future, the impact of the European economic crisis affects us, etc., as well as to better understand what Government actions are likely to prove most effective in preventing future situations.
So I had hoped Casey's book, "The Unfair Trade" would prove informative. However, as has happened with certain other books about the economy, my mind tended to drift, it just wasn't working for me, and I almost quit on this one. But I persevered, and I'm glad I stayed with it. I became much more interested toward the middle to latter sections of the book, which gave me a better appreciation of the true global-nature of our financial system, as well as a better understanding of the current (e.g., 2011 - 2013) European economic crisis, the dangers to both Europe as well as the U.S. should the Euro collapse, and the backgrounds regarding the European bailouts of Iceland, Ireland, Spain, and Greece. Casey gives many examples of how the global economy is impacting ordinary people across the globe, and does provide good background to help understand the economic news of the day. show less

My review is based on a Blinkist summary of the book so is really a review of this summary. Nevertheless, I’ve found the Blinkist summaries to be remarkably good in terms of extracting the gems from the whole book. And I’ve extracted a few of these gems from the summary itself as below:
For money to have value, there needs to be a shared agreement on its use as a medium of exchange......If just anyone could create new money, money would lose its value. There needs to be a limited amount show more of it for the system to work.
Bitcoin functions as money because people trust that it has value–just like “normal” money. When people started to see that real things could be bought using it, trust increased.
Ultimately, we can know that Bitcoin is money simply because people accept Bitcoins as units of exchange......You can’t create gold at home–you have to work hard finding it and mining it. Bitcoin works in a similar way. Instead of pickaxes, however, Bitcoins are mined with computers.....Solving these problems requires significant amounts of computational power. When a problem is solved, a Bitcoin reward is given to the miner and a new problem is issued.
The number of Bitcoins awarded is also halved every fourth year, so there’s an incentive to mine as many as you can before they run out. In total, 21 million Bitcoins will be released. According to one estimate, the last Bitcoin will be mined in 2040.....When a new Bitcoin is mined, a new block is created, validated and added to the chain.
There’s a Bitcoin record of all owners’ balances and transactions to ensure the same Bitcoin isn’t spent twice. This is the purpose of the blockchain, which everyone has access to. Every Bitcoin owner has an address–a unique and encrypted number assigned to them in the Bitcoin network. Addresses help keep track of who is who.....It removes the middleman and makes transactions cheaper and more efficient....In the fourteenth century, the Medici family served as a middleman between savers and borrowers.....This was the birth of the banking system
Bitcoin sprung from a movement that wanted to change this system by giving power back to the people.....When you buy a coffee at Starbucks with your credit card, it usually takes three business days for them to receive the money. With Bitcoin, the transaction is completed almost instantly.
Bitcoin protects its users by keeping their identities secret. [Which is a bit of a problem when criminal s use the system].
According to one estimate, over $1 billion was spent on building “rigs” of super-fast computers designed specifically for mining Bitcoins between April 2013 and April 2014.
Some people even claim that if the industry keeps growing at its current rate, it’ll cause an environmental catastrophe because it uses up so much electricity.
Innovations created at 20Mission have included MaidSafe, a solution that lets users rent out their free disk space over a decentralized network.....Investors were initially wary of putting their money into these kinds of projects, but this attitude has changed dramatically.
There are about 2.5 billion people worldwide who don’t have money in banks. They lack many of the freedoms people in developing [I assume this is a typo and he means “developed”] countries take for granted. Bitcoin could change all this. Bitcoin can give people in developing countries more economic freedom.
So, given all these benefits, what are the downsides of Bitcoin?
On 10 February 2014 a bug had been revealed in Bitcoin’s software that made it possible to create fake transactions and receive unwarranted payments.....Mt. Gox collapsed and the price of a single Bitcoin plummeted from $703 to $535. [If there was one bug how can we be sure that there won’t be more? I guess, no system is ever perfect but the longer it’s worked on then the more the bugs get eliminated.]
Bitcoin is also difficult to control, because of its distributed network.......information is sent across the entire web. This means it’s practically impossible to shut down. There’s no Bitcoin CEO or CTO who can get slapped with a subpoena.
Another problem is that Bitcoin can be used for criminal purposes, like selling drugs or even hiring hitmen.
The key message in this book: Anything can function as money as long as people agree it has value. Bitcoin has only existed for a few years, but the industry has boomed and peoples’ trust in Bitcoin as a form of currency has only increased. It has the potential to radically change our global economy by removing middlemen and providing anonymity. Despite their currently volatile nature and other downsides, cryptocurrencies are undoubtedly the future.
My take on the book? Well the author is clearly a “booster” for cryptocurrency and the doesn’t seem at all fazed by the various problems that have shown up. There doesn’t seem to be any discussion of the incredible volatility with bitcoin and the fact that just about every issue of bitcoin seems to have had problems ...especially with people obtaining passwords etc or getting access to internal codes and draining all the funds electronically, and untraceably. I’m quite happy for others to make the forays into cryptocurrency for the moment. And, it does seem to me that there are rather more people losing money than are making money. Actually, I thought the coverage was rather superficial for something written in 2016. And there was nothing in the book that inspired me to sell the house and invest the profits in cryptocurrency. There are still elements that I don’t understand...like who sets the mathematical problems that the miners have to solve? Who checks that it’s been correctly solved? And I don’t understand how the number of new issues gets halved every four years. Also, I’m curious about the impact Artificial Intelligence may have on this process. What if AI develops an algorithm to solve the hard problems in next to zero time? Presumably they will be hauling in Bitcoin hand-over-fist? ......Anyway, only two stars from me. show less