Money Without Masters: The Story of Crypto (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798252037295)

The story of digital money - from a radical idea to a global movement.

Bitcoin did not appear from nowhere. It was the product of decades of thinking about what money is, who controls it, and whether it could ever exist without institutions, governments or banks standing in the middle.

Money Without Masters traces that journey from the beginning.

Starting with the cypherpunks of the 1990s and the early experiments that laid the groundwork for Bitcoin, this book follows the full arc of cryptocurrency's development: the rise and catastrophic collapse of Mt. Gox, the creation of Ethereum and its programmable blockchain, the explosion of decentralised finance, and the entrance of institutions such as BlackRock into a space that once prided itself on operating beyond their reach.

Rather than focusing on price movements or investment strategies, Money Without Masters asks a deeper question: why did these systems appear in the first place? What problems were they trying to solve, and how well have they solved them?

Written in clear, accessible prose by educator and journalist Maria Irene, this book covers:

• The philosophical and technical origins of Bitcoin and the cypherpunk movement
• The rise and collapse of early exchanges, including the Mt. Gox disaster
• How Ethereum changed everything by making the blockchain programmable
• The role of stablecoins in bridging crypto and the traditional financial system
• Emerging networks such as the Internet Computer (ICP) and the decentralised AI marketplace Bittensor
• The growing idea that future digital economies may involve autonomous software agents transacting with one another - and what that means for money

This is not a book about getting rich. It is not a guide to trading, timing the market or picking winning tokens. It is something rarer: a calm, historically grounded account of how a new form of money came into existence, and why that story matters regardless of what the price of Bitcoin does next.

For anyone who has heard of cryptocurrency and wants to actually understand it.