I can't imagine very many of the people FOMOing in in recent months could understand the whitepaper even if they tried to read it.
The extent of their knowledge is usually something along the lines of "my friend/grandson/etc who fixed my computer once told me it would make me rich".
The biggest problem right now facing Bitcoin is the scaling problem. The current debate is between the "small-blockers", which support scaling bitcoin by limited block size increases and implementing off-chain transactions, and "large-blockers", which advocate continuous block-size increases. I personally don't think either method will scale in the long term, especially considering the original goals of decentralized digital cash. It is my opinion that both scaling paths force centralization of the network. This paper details Lightning Network, the current best design of off-chain scaling https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
Bitcoin is a gold standard and it will be used to settle multimillion-dollar agreements between large organizations or nations states. It's not relevant as a currency, other alternatives are already there.
Agreed; I'm a total believer in bitcoin but the people who are publicly skeptical tend to be the ones who are making the most sense and David Gerard is firmly within that group. This book is a pretty easy weekend read. You won't find in-depth technical analyses but you'll get a lot of funny stories about the crazy times we live in and some good criticisms of the entire space.
I second this book. While Gerard's writing is cynical and definitely biased against cryptocurrency and everything about them, nothing in it is actually wrong.
That being said, if you were looking for something more like a deep dive into the technical side of things, this isn't the right book.
Self-promotion: here's a booklet I wrote to describe Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the blockchain to barely technical people who kept asking me to describe it all over again: http://scepticsguide.ivoras.net/ . It covers some history, the hows and the whys, and takes a "don't rush in just because everyone's doing it" stance. It's a light read.
Just came out and published by McGraw-Hill. Cryptoassets by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar. It approaches crypto as an asset class and isn't very technical. Very much written for fund managers and active investors. Highly recommended.
