Blockchain and bitcoin: In search of a critique

One of the few things that has grown as fast this year as the price of cyptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, is the number of books available about them, along with blockchain technology and their many derivatives. There are now in excess of 500 books available on Amazon on these topics. These books include excellent technical guides like “Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain” by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, breathless accounts of the (short) histories of these technologies and wildly enthusiastic visions of a cryptocurrency- or blockchainbased future.