After a few weeks of hiatus/Den slacking, I'm apparently on a retirement Denstravaanza hunt now, so... REVIVE THE BOOK REVIEWS PROJECT! #1572885

Vijay's great achievement here is getting a serious, hard-hitting Bitcoin book published by an established, well-known, and respectable academic press! Only the Resistance Money/Philosopher teams, who are tenured professors all of them, have managed this before, afaik.

Principles of Bitcoin: Technology, Economics, Politics, and Philosophy is exactly what it says: an investigation into the tech, econ, politics, and philosophy of Bitcoin. How he snuck some of the stuff he writes by the editors and establishment wokies at (the other) CUP I have no idea...

This review was published in Bitcoin Magazine Print's The 2036 Issue in 2026, the mentioning of it is a condition of me republishing the review here.

Bitcoin has arrived. From the dreams of cypherpunks and the edges of legality, Bitcoin has stepped into the White House, onto Wall Street, and now also the academic establishment. It’s been a journey from novelty to rebellious opposition to quiet permanence. Step aside, tradfi, a new monetary architecture is here and it’s no longer asking for permission. At least that was the idea, with precious little of that spirit present among the many corporate-wrapped charters, national stockpiles, and custodial, KYC-infested financial services that dominate the landscape nowadays.

And this is the terrain Vijay Selvam maps in Principles of Bitcoin. Selvam, a corporate lawyer and financial services guy with a background at Goldman Sachs, has quietly achieved something almost nobody else has: infiltrating the big publishers. Two years ago, the Resistance Money philosophers managed to have their book published by Routledge, a large academic publisher, compared to which Selvam’s Ivy League university press is a step up.

Selvam’s glorious 300-page achievement is the most overlooked Bitcoin book of 2025; just the people praising the book on the jacket (Alden, Lopp, Booth, Gladstein) should be enough to make any Bitcoiner read it. And Selvam starts exactly in the right place — the point where digital and physical meet. “The innovation at the heart of Bitcoin,” Selvam writes early on, “was to bridge the digital and physical” (page 5); our emergent money is something that “has the properties of physical matter”, yet flies around the world unfazed by borders (or sanctions, or tariffs…) as effortlessly as the digital space. And that “dematerialization of property into digital form changes everything” (page 239).

We had lots of this recently #1515488, #1565551...

The hard task Selvam engages with, and from which certain segments of the Wall Street-peddling Bitcoin elite could learn, is the first-principles reasoning that considers Bitcoin’s role in the four spheres that guide the book (tech, econ, politics, philosophy). Bitcoin represents a clean, categorical break from prior digital and monetary systems: The book is thus philosophical without being mystical, technical without being exclusionary, and monetary in the deepest economic and philosophical meaning of the world — and it’s certainly a must-read for monetary economics aficionados.

"Bitcoin is, notably, a time chain; in contrast to other monetary regimes and monetary policies, it stabilizes not consumer prices or growth in nominal spending but first-layer block occurrence and thus money’s issuance rate."

That innovation is what permits a decentralized issuance of money on the internet, yet comes at the cost of price stability and predictability (under hyperbitcoinization) and extreme purchasing-power variability (in its current monetization phase). The implications of a politically neutral money, we learn, is that sanctions — and by extension tariffs, since those are self-imposed sanctions — destroy themselves, and depend crucially on the U.S. dollar’s central global role.

reading this book in summertime, ATH peace of last year was quite the bliss.

Aside from the elegant and fluent composition, there isn't too much in the book that's truly new or original — everybody builds on the shoulders of giants — but the value of Principles of Bitcoin lies in confidently, patiently, and professionally describe all the aspects of this monetary revolutionary for an audience (academic presses, university libraries) accustomed to instantly rejecting this “money-laundering” tool for techno-babbling Wall Street bros.

Despite an appearance on What Bitcoin Did and some scant promotion by the publisher, in the financial-engineering-obsessed year of 2025 ain’t nobody had time for serious, deep, and comprehensive considerations, or the technological improvements of unforgeable money cryptographically secured by the holder.

It is rare to find a Bitcoin book that I can highly and truly recommend, to interested newbies, yes, but certainly to those who wish to understand this orange-tinted phenomenon properly. Being published by the business wing of Columbia University Press, it has the stamp-of-approval from a traditional and prestigious academic press. It’s elegant, comprehensive, accurate, balanced, and altogether wonderful. While we drown in “Bro, let-me-describe-Bitcoin” books, Selvam’s creation book is denser, more comprehensive, and on select occasions, punchier than most of them.

In the concluding chapter, “Bitcoin is a Mirror,” he finishes in style, both perfectly sassy and genuinely humble: “A good place to start studying the subject [of Bitcoin and money] is simply to open one's mind to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, after fifteen years of critics being wrong, there might actually be more to the matter that a cursory examination yields” (page 271).

Good advice.

SELECT QUOTES: 

• "Bitcoin's purpose is, and has always been, to disrupt fiat money and the institution of central banking”. (p. 39)
• "Bitcoin creates a paradigm shift, imbuing the informational landscape with the unequivocal assurance of physical exchange. Bitcoin is thus a digital incarnation of physical certainty”. (p. 22)
• “Bitcoin embodies a libertarian philosophy, advocating for individual sovereignty and financial privacy”. (p. 14) 
• “Self-custody of one’s bitcoin without needing to depend on intermediaries and centralized authorities echoes the American Revolutionary spirit that fought the British Crown’s control of all economic and financial affairs, and taxation without representation” (p. 212)

BOOK on BOOKS Archive

Better Money? Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin by Lawrence White (#1556942)

I Am Not Your Bruh: 21 Keys to Sound Parenting, by George Mekhail (#1548087)

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (#1540851)

Gradually, Then Suddenly: A Framework for Understanding Bitcoin as Money, by Parker Lewis (#1536970)

Fiat Ruins Everything: How Our Financial System is Rigged and How Bitcoin Fixes it, by Jimmy Song (#1530254)

Bitcoin One Million, The Final Chapter of Fiat, by Fred Krueger & Ben Sigman (#1521960)

Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC, by Roger Ver (#1525907)

The Philosophy of Bitcoin, by Álvaro D. María (#1517354)