New project: a short book on Bitcoin and blockchain hype.

[reddragdiva]

sandifermessages You might try knocking together an ebook short. Aim for $2.99 and 15k words. "Why Bitcoin Is Stupid" or something.

reddragdiva :-D that's actually a REALLY good idea

sandifermessages Glad to help. :)

reddragdiva any tips? how hard should i work on this thing? how should i market it? etc etc just off the top of your head, i know 0 about this basically. i'd start with everything i've rambled on the topic in the past whatever which is huge amounts

sandifermessages I'd just market through your existing channels, and try not to spend more time on it than it needs. I'll give it a shout-out as well, obvs.

Well, I did it to him, now he's done it to me ...

So now I’m going through just my YOSPOS ramblings on the subject. In an hour I have 1200 words of abbreviated notes. Plus of course the start of a Rocknerd post on Machina Dynamica (which has nothing to do with blockchains, but I always thought if my sense of ethics left me I’d run an audiophile scam. Bitcoiners are EVEN BIGGER suckers). There’s still my /r/buttcoin and Rocknerd to go through as well, of course.

Oh good Lord this is going to eat my brain.

I doubt this will be kickstarted, I’ll just write the thing, put it up and promote it a bit. If I achieve 100 sales, I’ll call it spectacular success. If I achieve 20 I’ll be very pleased that this is possible.

Current working title:  “The False Promise of Blockchain: Bitcoin, blockchains, smart contracts and the madness of crowds”. Mind you, that's probably way more ambitious than I should actually be doing.

Ideas and suggestions most welcomed! What would you like to see covered?

(I'll probably do what Phil did and offer review copies to anyone who promises to write a review, positive or negative, and put it up on their blog. Then refine it based on those.)

Also front cover ideas. If only I had Chuck Tingle’s graphic designer.

edit: STATUS: 5000 words of notes and ideas. The resulting book would be 100k-200k words. I think I may need to focus more for the first one. There can be a series, and probably will if this turns out not to be a waste of effort.

What would people like to see in a short booklet-sized book about this general area? One person would like scam stories and why these people are annoying ... that’s a general area.

I don’t want to promise something that would need 200k. I need a small segment of that that will be 15k! arkady notes this is precisely the fact equivalent of breeding plotbunnies. “The last thing you need is to give the plotbunnies viagra.” I need a subsegment to start on ...

Comments

[http://xlogon.net/RogerBW]

For a front cover, I'd be inclined to use some combination of a hamster wheel, gold at the end of the rainbow, (gold) carrot on a stick, sleazy robots offering contracts to sign, and of course a pyramid in the background.

I will gladly review this on blog.firedrake.org.

[reddragdiva]

STATUS: 5000 words of notes and ideas. The resulting book would be 100k-200k words. I think I may need to focus more for the first one. What would people like to see in a *short* booklet-sized book about this general area?

[hairyears]

Will you use the term 'Dunning Krugerrand'?

[reddragdiva]

This question is more broadly "is this going to be serious and sober, or is it going to rip the piss, and if so to what extent."

I have enough ideas to write much more book than I can actually write. I need to actually think of something small ...

[reddragdiva]

Just added "As David Dunning and Justin Kruger pointed out in 1999, this approach tends not to work out so well."

I have small ambitions to get a review in some sort of proper financial press. If you have time I may hit you up to beta it for financial and trading aspects, so I don't Gladwell too bady ...

[ewt]

"Why Bitcoin is Stupid -- an overview". Don't go too deeply into any one subtopic, but explain the general principles enough that someone like me can grasp them.

My understanding of why blockchain currencies are a bad idea extends to 1] computers always do what you tell them to, not what you meant, and it's probably really easy to fuck this up and have no idea who you accidentally sent all your money to and when you do there is no way to put that right, at all, ever; and 2] it smells like some kind of pyramid scheme, but I dont know enough detail to be able to explain why.

Basically, you aren't going to convince anyone who already lurves bitcoin, and you aren't going to convince anyone who is Just Plain Gullible, but you might convince people who sortof get it/feel uneasy but aren't sure why, but don't care enough to have looked into it properly.

[ewt]

I'm assuming, here, that you want to convince people, and so you need to aim at people who can be convinced in both your selection of topics and in tone.

If you'd rather make 20 people laugh uproariously than convince anyone, well, I'm not your target audience -- but that's okay.

Distribution might, of course, affect your decisions here, too. If your existing network consists almost entirely of people who already understand why bitcoin is a bad idea and you don't want to bother finding people who need to be convinced, then the uproarious laughter strategy might sell you more copies. But it won't make a blind bit of difference otherwise, and there's something about making fun of people who are ignorant and a little bit desperate just for the sake of it which leaves a bad taste.

[reddragdiva]

Multiple books seems likely.

It's a bit like:
Phil: hey, you should write a 3-minute pop song
Me: great idea! (outlines 90-minute symphony)
Me: wonder if there are any good 3-minute sections of this

[tcpip]

Let me know if you want a hand with the economics parts.

[reddragdiva]

Turns out I will actually need one, specifically I need to expand on when the gold standard was completely mainstream economics before it turned into the exclusive domain of cranks and nutters (the variety of pseudoscience where someone fervently advocates a discarded idea). I'll put you on the beta list ...

[tcpip]

There's a very good chapter on the days of the gold standard by John Kenneth Galbraith in his book Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went. I'll see what I can put together over the coming weekend.