I thought it could be fun to have a topic where people could post books that have some relevance to the SAFE Network in some way. It could be sci-fi books, books about economy, programming or whatever other topic.
Here’s some from the top of my head
Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper
Great book about the history of cryptocurrencies, starting with the early conceptual ideas of cryptocurrencies from the cypherpunk movement in the early nineties.
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
Interesting book about the history of money. It does get a tad bit overly political at times though, as this kind of books usually do. It can also be found as a documentary on YouTube.
Money: The Unauthorized Biography–From Coinage to Cryptocurrencies by Felix Martin
On my reading list, but haven’t read it yet. Looks interesting though.
The end of Alchemy by Mervin King
A book about the financial crisis and central banks written by a former governor of the Bank of England. He comes with suggestions for ways to improve central banks to alleviate financial crises in the future. I mostly found it fun to think of crypto alternatives for the central bank things he writes about.
Daemon & Freedom by Daniel Suarez
These two books details the creation of what is basically a DAO programmed to change the world. An extreme variant of the kind of AI that could live on SAFE. Reads like a hollywood action movie.
The Nexus trilogy by Ramex Naam
Sci-fi trilogy about a “drug” that connects the brain to the internet. Doesn’t really have any SAFE-like technology per se, but once we do get to a stage with technology like this, securing data will become more important than ever.
Mirror Worlds by David Gelernter
David Gelernter describes his visions for the future of the internet in a book written just a couple years before the web was invented. His ideas are based around the concept of a tuple space, a kind of shared database used to coordinate computation between apps running on networked computers. Tuple space were, and still are, used for distributed computing, but only in trusted environments like an office network, they never figured out a way to make it scale out to internet scale. They didn’t have a secure autonomous data network after all. Not all of the ideas described necessarily makes sense today, but some could be useful for inspiration when writing SAFE apps. Even something kinda like the tuple space concept itself could be implemented with mutable data.