What to read about crypto: books on technology, markets and psychology

Good books on crypto and trading can save you years of trial and error, while bad ones just sell you someone else's confidence. We've put together a short list of proven reads in three areas: how the technology works, how the market works and how to keep your own psychology from letting you down. For each book, we briefly explain why it's worth your time and what to look out for.

How to choose books on cryptocurrency

The crypto market moves fast, while books are written and translated slowly: by the time a book is out, some of what's in it is already outdated. The texts that age best cover the fundamentals: how money and blockchain work, how people behave in markets. Forecasts and write-ups of specific services age the worst.

Look at who's behind a book and what their interests are. Plenty of bestsellers were written by die-hard fans of a single coin or by people selling courses and tokens. That doesn't make them worthless, but read them as the view of one camp. A good test: does the author admit the weak spots in what they're arguing for?

You don't need to read everything: the list below is set up so that one or two books from each block are enough. Many of them have been translated into other languages, but translated titles vary from edition to edition, so we give the original English titles.

Books, of course, aren't the only source. For news, breakdowns of network upgrades and live discussion there are fresher formats, and we cover how to pick out the useful ones in the lesson on videos, podcasts and blogs. But books are the better way to lay a foundation: they make you stay with a topic for longer than fifteen minutes and give you the full picture rather than a pile of scattered opinions.

Technology: how Bitcoin and Ethereum work

These texts are useful if you want to understand what exactly you're buying instead of just watching the price. They pair well with the level 1 lessons of this course: if a chapter feels hard, go back to the lesson on how blockchain works and then give it another go.

Don't let the technical chapters scare you off. You can skip the code and formulas on a first read, since the core ideas are explained in plain words. If the history interests you more than the mechanics, start with the next section and come back to the technical side later.

• Satoshi Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System": the 2008 whitepaper itself, the primary source for the entire industry.
• Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum whitepaper: a description of the platform for smart contracts; for up-to-date network documentation, go to ethereum.org.
• Andreas M. Antonopoulos, "Mastering Bitcoin": a detailed breakdown of how Bitcoin works, covering keys, transactions, blocks and mining.
• Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood, "Mastering Ethereum": the same for Ethereum and smart contracts, useful if you want to understand DeFi from the inside.
• Arvind Narayanan et al., "Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies": a university textbook that explains cryptography and consensus without the hype.

History and markets: what booms and busts teach

Stories of how projects rise and collapse teach you more than any set of rules. As you read them, you'll see the same plot lines again and again: big promises, hype, leverage, blind faith in charismatic leaders. These books make a good follow-up to the lesson on the history of cryptocurrency.

A separate word on "The Bitcoin Standard". It's popular and vividly written, but it's a manifesto for one school of economics, not an impartial textbook. It's worth reading to understand the arguments of Bitcoin's supporters, but read the criticism alongside it too.

• Nathaniel Popper, "Digital Gold": the story of Bitcoin's early years and the people who pushed it forward.
• Laura Shin, "The Cryptopians": how Ethereum was created and the conflicts that came with the early crypto boom.
• Michael Lewis, "Going Infinite": the rise and fall of FTX and its founder; a useful illustration of the risk of keeping money on an exchange.
• Saifedean Ammous, "The Bitcoin Standard": the case for Bitcoin as money with a limited supply.

Trading: classics that work in crypto too

Almost all the strong books on trading were written about stocks and futures. That's not a drawback: charts, orders, risk management and human mistakes are the same everywhere. Crypto adds round-the-clock trading and high volatility, but it doesn't change the basics.

Don't expect a ready-made system for the crypto market from them. Their value lies elsewhere: they show how experienced people think about probabilities, mistakes and position size. The traders in "Market Wizards" use completely different methods, but almost all of them are equally strict about cutting losses.

Read these books alongside the course levels on market analysis and risk management. Test every convincing idea on historical data and on a demo account before you put real money behind it.

• Edwin Lefèvre, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator": a fictionalized biography of an early-20th-century speculator, about speculation and self-deception.
• Jack D. Schwager, "Market Wizards": interviews with successful traders; the key takeaway isn't their strategies but their attitude to risk.
• John J. Murphy, "Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets": a technical analysis reference covering trends, levels, patterns and indicators.
• Alexander Elder, "The New Trading for a Living": system, psychology and money management in one book.
• Mark Douglas, "Trading in the Zone": why traders with a good strategy still lose money.

Risk, probability and the psychology of money

The last block isn't directly about crypto, but it may well be the most important one. Most losses in the market come not from bad analysis but from how we perceive randomness, risk and our own mistakes. These books pair well with the lesson on trading psychology.

They're especially worth rereading after a string of losing trades. While the mistakes are still fresh, the descriptions of cognitive biases stop being abstract: you recognize yourself in them and can set a rule in advance that keeps you from making the same mistake again.

To make what you read stick, write down one rule after each chapter that changes how you trade. After a few months these notes will add up to a trading plan of your own, and it will serve you better than anyone else's strategy.

• Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow": the thinking errors that get in the way of decisions about money.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "Fooled by Randomness": how to tell luck from skill and why rare events happen more often than you'd think.
• Annie Duke, "Thinking in Bets": how to judge a decision by the quality of the reasoning, not by the outcome of a single trade.
• Morgan Housel, "The Psychology of Money": short chapters on how behavior affects money more than knowledge does.
• Burton G. Malkiel, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street": a skeptical look at attempts to beat the market, a useful counterweight to trading books.