colin reviewed The Infinite Machine by Camila Russo
Uncritical, overly positive, occasionally interesting
2 stars
This book is a fairly dry blow-by-blow of the creation of Ethereum, based on interviews with many of the people involved. It's fairly dull. Almost everything that happens in this book is given a positive spin. A few paragraphs close to the end are devoted to describing what essentially amounts to a payday loan via an app powered by Ethereum. Nothing is remarkable about the loan other than the way the money is transferred, but it's presented as a revolution in finance where everyone is happy with the result.
The book describes multiple security exploits and attacks, but uncritically papers over the flaws inherent in the design of the network (and the obvious failures of the developers to plan for abuse) by lauding the hacker skills involved in rescuing the network from destruction.
There's some things that were vaguely interesting here. Occasionally the author will veer into questions about the …
This book is a fairly dry blow-by-blow of the creation of Ethereum, based on interviews with many of the people involved. It's fairly dull. Almost everything that happens in this book is given a positive spin. A few paragraphs close to the end are devoted to describing what essentially amounts to a payday loan via an app powered by Ethereum. Nothing is remarkable about the loan other than the way the money is transferred, but it's presented as a revolution in finance where everyone is happy with the result.
The book describes multiple security exploits and attacks, but uncritically papers over the flaws inherent in the design of the network (and the obvious failures of the developers to plan for abuse) by lauding the hacker skills involved in rescuing the network from destruction.
There's some things that were vaguely interesting here. Occasionally the author will veer into questions about the speculative nature of crypto, the environmental aspect, the commodification of everything, web3,and so on, and implies that some of the people involved are also struggling with these questions. But that exploration never gets very deep, and is often no more than a sentence or two followed by a bunch of exuberance about crypto.
After I was finished with the book, I discovered that the author is turning it into a movie, being funded/produced with NFTs, so I guess that tells you something about the voice here.
