Crypto's Confusing New Landscape

Last week, I reviewed three new books on the cryptocurrency Ethereum for the Wall Street Journal. I've included the first two paragraphs and a link to the full review below.  

Three Books to Map Crypto's Confusing New Landscape

After Bitcoin came Ethereum, and debates over the future of cryptocurrency were not far behind.

In 2013, a Russian-born and Canadian-educated computer programmer named Vitalik Buterin published a white paper describing a new cryptocurrency he thought could rival Bitcoin. Then only 19 years old, Mr. Buterin envisioned Ethereum as an “all-purpose computational platform for smart contracts and decentralized autonomous corporations.” Beyond digital money, Mr. Buterin believed cryptocurrency could be used to record wills, document insurance contracts, authenticate art ownership, or even enable a new democratic governance system for companies and organizations.

He spent the next two years with a small and contentious group at a shared house in Zug, Switzerland, working to turn the vision into a reality, culminating in the official launch of the so-called “genesis block” of Ethereum in 2015. The first adopters of the cryptocurrency were an odd mix of libertarians and cyber punks, who dreamed of a system free from control by governments or wealthy elites. “No lawyers, no bankers, no accountants, everything is outsourced to the blockchain,” enthused one Ethereum developer, referring to one of the central innovations behind Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies.