Start with the question of money
The book begins where the real argument begins, with what money is, why it forms, and why people keep looking for harder forms of it.
The book
What the book does
A lot of Bitcoin writing starts by assuming agreement. The rest dismisses the subject as nonsense. This book takes a different route: first principles, plain language, and the objections left in view.
Explain the technical parts plainly
Wallets, keys, transactions, blocks, mining, double spending, and proof of work are all covered without assuming a computer science background.
Take the objections seriously
Energy use, volatility, scaling, governance, and the political tradeoffs are not side notes. They are part of understanding Bitcoin honestly.
Keep the economics attached to the engineering
Bitcoin matters because code, incentives, and monetary theory meet in one place. The book keeps those threads tied together.
Reading guide
Open the full contents
How the book is structured
If you want to see the path before spending time with the full text, start here. The guide below lays out the structure chapter by chapter.
Chapter 1
Introduction
A short opening on why arguments about Bitcoin usually fail when people skip the question of money itself.
Chapter 2
What is Bitcoin?
A plain-language definition of Bitcoin, what makes it different from a payment app or a company, and how digital scarcity enters the picture.
Chapter 3
Money and currencies
The book steps back into monetary theory, the functions and properties of money, the origin of currencies, and the economic ideas that prepared the ground for Bitcoin.
Chapter 4
How Bitcoin works
Wallets, asymmetric encryption, transactions, blocks, the blockchain, and mining, explained in the order that makes the system easiest to follow.
Chapter 5
Technological aspects
The Byzantine Generals problem, double spending, decentralization, transparency, anonymity, scaling concerns, and second-layer systems like Lightning.
Chapter 6
Economic aspects
Inflation, deflation, stock-to-flow, liquidity, volatility, exchanges, and the awkward but important tradeoffs of adoption.
Chapter 7
Suitability as money
A direct look at whether Bitcoin can function as money economically, technologically, and politically, not just in theory but in practice.
Chapter 8
The Bitcoin economy
The path from early experiments to broader adoption, including price cycles, crisis use cases, and the sectors already building around Bitcoin.
Chapter 9
Closing words
A practical ending on what Bitcoin may become, what it already is, and why the deeper question remains the same: what should money be?
Editions
Paperback and ebook
Prefer the paperback or ebook edition? These are the current versions.
Author
About Cosmin Novac
Cosmin Novac is an early Bitcoin adopter and a data scientist with experience across banking, insurance, and energy. He earned a Master's degree in IT Management in Cologne, Germany.
His work focuses on Bitcoin, economics, AI, infrastructure, incentives, and the way technology redistributes power.
The essays below continue that line of thought.
Essays
Essays that continue the same conversation
These pieces sit next to the book for a reason. They take the same questions into adjacent territory, with short versions here and links to the full originals on Medium.
Bitcoin's Proof of Work: The problem of the Byzantine Generals
Read the hosted excerpt
The Byzantine Generals problem sounds abstract until you restate it plainly: it is not enough for everyone to know something. They must know that everyone else knows it, and know that the others know that too. In a digital monetary system with no central referee, that recursive certainty matters.
Bitcoin solves this not with trust in a leader but with proof of work, a costly public signal that lets strangers converge on one history of transactions. The energy cost is not decorative. It is what makes cheating expensive and consensus legible.
Once you see that, mining looks less like a weird side effect and more like the price of decentralized agreement.
The Intrinsic Value of Bitcoin
Read the hosted excerpt
Most people hear "store of value" and think of gold bars, property, or art. The awkward truth is that we keep forcing useful things into that role because inflation makes cash a bad long-term container for saved work. Houses become investment vehicles. Land sits empty. Paintings turn into vaults with frames.
Bitcoin is different because storage and transfer of value are not accidental side effects. They are the point. It gives people a scarce digital asset that can be moved across borders and time without asking a central institution for permission.
That does not erase volatility. It explains why volatility exists. A new asset trying to become a global store of value cannot move in a straight line, but that does not mean it is empty.
Rootstock (RSK) explained
Read the hosted excerpt
Rootstock is a sidechain connected to Bitcoin through a two-way peg. The pitch is simple: keep Bitcoin's monetary gravity, then add smart-contract functionality and faster, cheaper execution on top.
The attraction is obvious. You gain programmability without inventing a brand-new monetary base. The tension is obvious too. Once you move value through a federated peg, you are accepting coordination and trust tradeoffs that do not exist in the same way on Bitcoin's base layer.
That does not make RSK pointless. It makes it something that has to be judged honestly, by what it enables and by what it asks users to trust.