The Bullish Case for Bitcoin

Expanded from Vijay Boyapati's famous 2018 essay, this short book explains how money actually comes into being. New forms of money, he argues, climb a ladder of adoption: first a collectible prized by a few, then a store of value held by many, then a medium of exchange used in trade, and finally a unit of account we price everything else in. Boyapati maps Bitcoin onto that path, showing it is early on the same journey gold once travelled, and lays out the game theory — why individuals, companies and eventually nations are each nudged to adopt it before the others do. He also weighs the real risks honestly, from protocol bugs to government hostility to being out-competed.

It gives you the single most useful mental model on this shelf: Bitcoin as emerging money moving up a predictable ladder, not a tech stock to be timed. That frame explains the volatility, the sceptics and the long-term thesis in one picture. Short enough to read in a sitting and clarifying enough that you keep coming back to it.