Generally, most books suck, particularly Bitcoin and tech industry ones. There is only one good Bitcoin book, Cryptoeconomics, and even that one I would debate some aspects of, but at least it is intelligent, rational, and can be applied. Otherwise, books that have influenced me are The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, and metaphysical speeches by people like Alan Watts, Jordan Peterson, etc. The way I tackle a topic is to obsess about it and discard bullshit with extreme prejudice. I went into a very deep rabbit hole for a long time to design Synonym's vision and choices. What's important is to make new mistakes, so you have to make sure to shed old ones and focus on what is left and the dynamics involved. Primitives are all that matter, you can't design without identifying them and knowing where the edges of a system really are.

As I modeled a hyperbitcoinized world I came to the conclusion that there will always be multiple forms of money and the need for finance (using other peoples money to accelerate growth and cooperate on larger goals) and thus you need at least Bitcoin as decentralized abstracted value and "credit" as trusted issuer-defined value. We need tokens as credit and we need them to be as programmable as Bitcoin so we can leverage trust and abstract away the need for government fiat entirely.

I guess it isn't up to me to decide what is the most controversial take, but you could go through my Good Morning tweets and look at the ones with the most replies I guess :) https://twitter.com/i/events/1442133822724841472