Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper.

Inner Engineering by Jaggi Vasudev.

Sapiens by Yuval Harari.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

Laszlo’s CPU had been winning, at most, one block of 50 Bitcoins each day, of the approximately 140 blocks that were released daily. Once Laszlo got his GPU card hooked in he began winning one or two blocks an hour, and occasionally more. On May 17 he won twenty-eight blocks; these wins gave him fourteen hundred new coins that day.

Satoshi knew someone would eventually spot this opportunity as Bitcoin became more successful and was not surprised when Laszlo e-mailed him about his project. But in responding to Laszlo, Satoshi was clearly torn. If one person was taking all the coins, there would be less of an incentive for new people to join in.

“I don’t mean to sound like a socialist,” Satoshi wrote back. “I don’t care if wealth is concentrated, but for now, we get more growth by giving that money to 100% of the people than giving it to 20%.”

As a result, Satoshi asked Laszlo to go easy with the “high powered hashing,” the term coined to refer to the process of plugging an input into a hash function and seeing what it spit out.

But Satoshi also recognized that having more computing power on the network made the network stronger as long as the people with the power, like Laszlo, wanted to see Bitcoin succeed.”

One can imagine the outrage it will cause if it happened today.

[Blockchain Revolution by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott](https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Revolution-Technology-Chan...)
[The Business Blockchain by William Mougayar](https://www.amazon.com/Business-Blockchain-Practice-Applicat...)
[Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper](https://www.amazon.co.jp/Digital-Gold-Bitcoin-Millionaires-R...)

If you want to dig deeper, read [Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas M. Antonopoulos](https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Unlocking-Digital-C...).

Yes, and you can abstract that observation from blockchains to cryptography in general, which is the underlying foundation of blockchain technology’s game theoretic fault tolerance. This is particularly clear once you move closer to cryptography’s theoretical and mathematical foundations and away from specific applications (such as encryption or authentication).

Many cryptography textbooks begin with an elementary definition and discussion of the field using notions such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, non-repudiation, etc. These are all correct, but I prefer Oded Goldreich’s definition, from his Foundations of Cryptography:

Cryptography is concerned with any problem in which one wishes to limit the effects of dishonest users.

In an abstract sense, cryptography has a direct mapping from game theory, and can be considered the use of computational complexity to resolve scenarios in adversarial relationships.

If you’re enjoying looking at blockchains through this lens, you might want to read a few papers on cryptogenography, or zero knowledge proofs (the latter has far more literature). There is also a lot of fun research that uses game theory to model fault tolerance and economics in blockchains.

I read both "Digital Gold" by Nathaniel Popper about the early days of Bitcoin and "The Infinite Machine" by Camila Russo about the inception of Ethereum and the difference between the early sentiment in those two projects is striking.

Bitcoin came from a cypherpunk background and was very anti establishment whereas Ethereum seems to have been setup and conducted like a startup company. There was much more money involved starting the latter project.

I can relate to the sentiment of the author though, money sucks the fun out of many things.
But finance is at the heart of both projects, so it's too be expected that they get more professional and more business-like while they grow.