Andreas Hedqvist: Libra Path to Approval — a quick overview for crypto believers

• Andreas Hedqvist: Libra Path to Approval: The new corporate digital currency (self-published, August 2019 — UK, US)

The story of Libra is still unfolding — but there’s already tremendous public interest, leading to a flood of slush on Amazon Kindle. This is one of the pile of Libra books I read on Kindle Unlimited last weekend, and it’s the only one so far that’s worth any time.

Hedqvist is a Bitcoin believer, and the book is very much written from a crypto perspective, for crypto people — a general public reader would have trouble understanding where it’s coming from. (Nobody who reads this blog will have any trouble.)

The writing is very stilted, and rambles at times — Hedqvist is not a native English speaker. The book really needs an editor, or a collaborator to re-render it in clear and idiomatic English.

But Hedqvist knows his material, and covers all the areas you’d expect. He tries to give a decent overview of Libra, given what little solid information there is.

A lot of the content is condensed versions of source documents from banks, regulators or the Libra site. Hedqvist does an okay job of this — his explanation of the Libra consensus mechanism gave me a much better overview than the official developer documents, for instance.

Sometimes there’s an impression he just threw things in that looked relevant — it’s like the book was quickly assembled from the chapter list downwards.

I could argue a lot of Hedqvist’s interpretations of what it all means, particularly the weird crypto-economics in chapter 6 — but he clearly knows the area.

Hedqvist’s forecast for Libra’s release is 2021 or 2022 — he’s pretty sure they won’t have anything that will even do the job technically out by 2020, let alone satisfy regulators. But he thinks Libra will be a “historical milestone” that will take cryptocurrency mainstream.

If you’re into crypto and sling the jargon, reading this won’t feel like a waste of your time. It’s a bit expensive to buy, given how short it is — but it’s well worth a skim on Kindle Unlimited.