Enthusiastic Fediverse poster David Gerard has made a career out of exposing cryptocurrency incompetence through his blogs ( davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain) and toots ( @davidgerard@circumstances.run ). This book is a longform exposé of Facebook's disastrous attempts to climb onto the cryptocurrency bandwagon with a fantasy called Libra. Like his previous book which more generally covered Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, this is a witty read as informed as it is humourous. There were a few moments which dug a bit more deeply into the financial system than I was completely comfortable with but maybe I'm just an idiot. The whole sorry affair is somewhat succinctly summed up in the following couple of sentences:

"Facebook was forced to transform its great plan into PayPal-but-it's-Facebook -- or Libra wouldn't allowed to exist. Though the back-end system would still run on a blockchain -- for no functional reason, but they could say it was on a blockchain."

You can read the author's original post on Foreign Policy which inspired the book ( archive.is/nb9G8 ) and you can buy signed copies directly from his website (davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/11/26/get-signed-copies-of-libra-shrugged-and-attack-of-the-50-foot-blockchain/) where warnings against buying cryptocurrency will be included in the form of scribbles and stickers at no extra cost.

Also, chapter 15 mentioned an offline central bank digital currency (CBDC) in Finland called Avant which started back in the nineties. I was interested to read more about it and the first result of a cursory internet search was... a post by David Gerard ( davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/01/25/avant-card-a-central-bank-digital-currency-from-1990s-finland/ ) which links through to a deeper dive by the Bank of Finland (archived here: web.archive.org/web/20201101175907/https://helda.helsinki.fi/bof/bitstream/handle/123456789/17590/BoFER_8_2020.pdf ).