Learn to Earn

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I know we live in the era of bite-sized media and that our attention spans only last seven seconds (love that you’re still reading this!). But crypto is a pretty vast and complex field, and sometime short-form just doesn’t cut it when you want to gather a true understanding of a topic.
So today, we’re sharing five books that are very helpful if you’re looking to learn more about blockchain and cryptocurrency.

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum, by Cami Russo

Ever wonder how Ethereum got started? Where Vitalik Buterin got the idea? Or how it became the second most important blockchain in the world worth over $250 billion dollars?

Us too.

Which is why we picked up this book. Diving deep into Ethereum’s origin story, Russo’s narrative walks us through the early, critical years. The story is punctuated with ups, downs, twists, turns, fights, hacks, and more. A boring techie read this is not.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order, by Michael Casey and Paul Vigna

Instead of Ethereum, this book looks at Bitcoin’s origins. But it goes much further than that by going deep into cypherpunk history (the movement that leads to Bitcoin), the history of cryptography, global blockchain use cases, and so much more.

Not going to lie; we were surprised by how enthusiastic, and supportive two Wall Street Journal writers were about cryptocurrency. This book definitely takes a journalistic approach, well-researched and unbiased. The book was originally published in 2015, and the blockchain space moves at lightning speed, but this book never feels outdated or dusty because the authors focus so well on fundamentals.

How Money Works: The Facts Visually Explained (How Things Work)

Ok, this is a really fun book because it's created for visual learners…its a picture book full of infographics, charts, and diagrams, which helps make all the financial jargon easier to digest and understand.

In the 0xx community, we found that even though folks were super excited to learn about crypto-finance, their traditional financial literacy was still lacking (understandably, women's financial literacy stat), and this led to decreased confidence and overall investing.

This book helps us get over some of those roadblocks on our way to financial empowerment. Could I pass the CPA (certified public accountant) exam tomorrow? Well, not quite. But hey, after reading this book, I can better explain what bonds, derivatives are, and things like repo. Trust us, this book helps.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, By Adam Tooze

We said we were going deep, didn’t we? In order to understand just how badly our financial system needs new incentives, new structures, and new mechanisms, it helps to understand just how completely f*cked our current system is. This book covers the before, during, and after of the subprime mortgage crisis and global financial meltdown of 2008, the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis, Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, Trump’s rise to power, how these things are all related, and a whole lot more.

I don’t know why people need to read political thrillers when you can just read this book. It's a dense page-turner, and it will definitely keep you up and take you deep.

The Green Pill, By Kevin Owocki

Another book that leads heavily with visuals, this is about how economies form around shared values and how to overcome common human coordination failures that often plague us from fixing the problems we all know need fixing using Web3 tech. It's a very fun, quick read.

If you’re interested in Regenerative Finance (ReFi), this is the book for you!

We recommend the $13 pdf version, which you can purchase here:  https://store.gitcoin.co/

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