New York Review of Books: Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain is ‘a sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency’

Good Lord, I’m reviewed in the New York Review of Books, 18 January 2018, by Sue Halpern!

It’s a review of my book in tandem with Don and Alex Tapscott’s Blockchain Revolution (UK, US). It’s actually a general article about Bitcoin with the books as flavouring — not one that’s really derived from the content of either book. But still.

 

 

I’m mentioned in two paragraphs. The first is about Bitcoin mining:  “According to David Gerard—whose new book, Attack of the Fifty Foot Blockchain, is a sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency like the Tapscotts’ — ‘By the end of 2016,’ a single mining facility in China was using ‘over half the estimated power used by all of Google’s data centres worldwide at the time.'” The second concerns exchanges: “Gerard notes that ‘as of March 2015, a full third of all Bitcoin exchanges’ — where people stored their bitcoin — ‘up to then had been hacked, and nearly half had closed.'”

For this sort of thing, it helps to be the one general critical book published in the last couple of years … I have Jeffrey Robinson’s 2014 book BitCon: The Naked Truth about Bitcoin here (UK, US) and need to write it up.