Blockchain Books
Broken Money
Why Our Financial System Is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better
Lyn Alden's wide-screen history of money, the technology behind it, and why she thinks the current global monetary system is structurally unwell.
Alden's first book is, in effect, what The Bitcoin Standard wanted to be — a serious, technically grounded, historically careful argument that the current monetary system is structurally broken and that Bitcoin is at least a plausible response to that brokenness. Alden is a working macro analyst rather than a polemicist, and the book reads accordingly: long, dense, charts on most pages, and remarkably little of the tribal posturing that drags down most Bitcoin books.
Who it's for
Readers who want the most rigorous available case for Bitcoin from a macro perspective, and who don't mind a 500-page book to get it. Particularly valuable for finance professionals who find the typical Bitcoin canon embarrassing and want something they can hand to a colleague without flinching. Not a primer; you should already know roughly what Bitcoin is before you start.
What it does well
The history is the foundation, and it's excellent. Alden treats money as a technology and walks through how every previous form — shells, coins, gold, paper, electronic ledgers — was shaped by the communications and settlement technologies of its era. The chapters on how the telegraph reshaped global banking, and on the eurodollar system, are some of the clearest explanations of those subjects in any popular book.
She's also unusually careful with the Bitcoin case. Where most Bitcoin authors handwave at "fiat is broken," Alden specifies what she means, where, and over what time horizons. The chapters on the realities of life under broken monetary regimes — Argentina, Lebanon, Egypt, Nigeria — are reported rather than asserted, and they shift the conversation from theory to lived experience.
Where it falls short
It is long. There's a 300-page version of this book that would be tighter, and Alden occasionally circles back to material she's already covered. The book also assumes a baseline of macro literacy that some readers won't have; if you've never thought about money supply, interest-rate channels, or balance of payments, expect to slow down.
Finally, while Alden is careful, she is making a case, and the case bends toward Bitcoin. Read alongside a more skeptical macro author and you'll get a balanced picture. On its own terms, though, this is the best single-volume Bitcoin-and-money book currently in print.