It's an anthropological PhD thesis. I'm like 30% through it. Good stuff in there. Gonna have to finish reading it tomorrow. https://etheses.lse.ac.uk/4775/
Discussion
LSE, enough said. It was started by the Fabian Society i.e. communists. Their coat of arms is literally a wolf in sheep's clothing.. 
You can judge a thesis by the name of the school or you could read the contents. I choose the latter.
There's only so much time in a life, it's not possible to read everything
But let me know if you find anything good
Good point. I opened and saw word count 😱 vnprc reads wicked fast though, so hoping he’ll share some insights
I'm actually a pretty slow reader because I have an intrinsic desire to be thorough. But this paper is an easy read compared to my usual fare of deeply technical documentation written by technically brilliant, but bad writers. 😅
I had some vague recollection of you recommending a Brains mining book and mentioning it was a short read. Lies! 😂
Seriously though this does sound interesting, and I just might give it the 30 page read
what? that book is thinner than a finger!
just wait 'til you discover Neal Stephenson 😈
lol. I’m aware and have read a few of his books. Revisited him to read cryptonomicon a few years back and gave up quickly for some reason. Probably cuz it was too thick 😂
Anathema stands out to me from the short list I’ve read
If memory serves it was 80ish pages of pretty technical stuff. Thats a lot to me! I’m woefully ignorant of almost all mining technicals (though plan to learn someday), so my impression is it was a bit advanced and would take several days to digest :/
Ah that makes sense. I didn't think about how accessible it was. Honestly I skimmed over the numbers and most of the graphs and just paid attention to the author's conclusions. I guess I read that book with a goal in mind and didn't try to grok the parts that didn't advance my goal.
So true. My stack of books to read only ever gets taller.
This paper is a long one. I'm about 1/3rd through it. I probably won't finish before BitDevs tonight.
The good news is that the author spends 30 pages summarizing the following ~180 pages so you can get the big picture without wading through the whole thing.
The TL;DR is that academic anthropologists are bad at their jobs. This is the first serious anthropological treatment of the crypto community. Those who came before just gussied up their own opinions in the jargon of their field and pretended they were doing valuable science.
She links the crypto movement to historical American political battles over money and the (true) belief that money is a collective hallucination.
I'm reading between the lines but I think her field experience radicalized her. Good! It's amazing what happens when you set aside your preconceived notions and try to understand things from a different perspective. I hope it becomes a trend in the field.